if it was on the front page; the space-men were measuring the columns to see how much they had earned; and the make-up for the second edition, out at noon, was being hastened on behind the buzzing machinery in the rear.
By this time I must have written two columns at least, and I began to wonder. Perhaps I was to appear in the principal final edition at six o'clock! On the front page! The article, evidently, was considered important! The notion that I was making a fool of myself, being made a fool of, rather, also occurred to me. I wrote on and on ... it was hunger finally that stopped me. I was famished. I turned to an albino reporter next me, a mere boy, whose peculiarity had earned him the nickname "Whitey." Was I allowed to go out for lunch? "Just tell Cooper you're going," he replied. "Come out with me," he added, "if you've finished your story. I'm going in a moment." I finished my "story" then and there, putting the circle with three dots in it which, he explained, meant finis to the printers. "Just hand it in to Cooper, and we'll get right out," he said. I obeyed, Cooper taking my pile of "copy" with a grin, and merely nodding his head when I mentioned lunch. He was a young man with thick curly black hair, big spectacles that magnified his good-natured eyes, only slightly less rapid and electric than McCloy, but yet so unsure of himself that the reporters soon found him out--and treated him accordingly. I saw my precious "copy" shoved to one side of his desk, but I never saw it again, either in print or elsewhere. No mention was ever made of it. It was, doubtless, two columns of the dullest rubbish ever scribbled in that office.
"I guess Mac only wanted to see what you could do," explained the albino, as we swallowed "sinkers" (heavy dough scones) and gulped down coffee at Childs' Cheap Lunch Counter round the corner. Whitey had invited me to lunch; he "put me wise" about a thousand things; showed me how to make a bit on my weekly expense-account, if I wanted to; how one could "sneak
off" about five o'clock, if one knew the way; and, most
