It was not the purchase of the gun that was troubling him. It was the thought that he had never in all his life so much as discharged a revolver. He would not even know how to load it. But then Tiernan would doubtless be able to show him.
A telephone bell was shrilling at the editor's elbow.
"Is that all?" demanded the impatient man of affairs as he turned to the 'phone. He called a cryptic sentence or two into the transmitter and slapped the receiver back on its hook.
"Yes, I guess that's all," answered the wide-eyed boy, with his hat in his hand.
"Then go and make good," said the man at the desk as Tiernan swung in through the office door. "Go and get your story!"
VII
In a newspaper office, where one impression so quickly and inevitably obliterates another, sensation is startling only in the fact of its ephemerality. For two busy hours wave after wave of the world's turbulence had beaten on the shoreline of the Advance staff's attention. Every one knew, from Pyott down, that the day was a "big" one. And since it is seldom the ever-arriving guests of sensation which disturb a newspaper office but rather the secondary thought of bestowing them in their right chamber and bed and fitting them with their right "heading" night-caps, the ordeal of the Advance's day had reached its second and most exacting crisis. So when Pyott, the managing editor, was called up on the wire by Obed Tyrer, the President of the First National Trust, the call from that quarter carried with it no responsive curiosity.
"Can you come up here right away?" demanded the banker, in a voice of that coerced tranquillity into which the trained mind translates itself when face to face with undue excitement.
"No; I can't! "
"Why can't you?"