Part 77

His face, as he came out to the light, was almost colorless. His eyes were wide and staring with wonder. He kept telling himself that he must walk slowly, that he must in no way betray himself, that he must appear indifferent and offhand and inconspicuous to every one he chanced to pass. He felt the necessity of guarding himself, for he was now a person of importance. He was an emissary of destiny, an agent entrusted with a vast issue.

The streets through which he passed no longer frowned down at him from their inhospitable skylines. He was no longer an unattached and meaningless unit in the life that throbbed and roared all about him. He meant something to it. He was part of it. He was its guardian. And it would acknowledge him, in the end, or he would know the reason why.

Trotter sat peering mildly about him as that Gargantuan organism known as a newspaper office labored and shrieked in the birth of an afternoon edition. Subterranean Hoe presses roared and hummed, telegraph keys clicked and cluttered, typewriters tapped and clattered like a dozen highholders on a hollow elm, telephone bells shrilled, shouting pressmen came and went, unkempt copy boys trailed back and forth with their festoons of limp galley proof, and Hubbart, with close-set eyes and a forehead like a bisected ostrich egg, sat at the City Desk, calmly presiding over an otherwise frenzied accouchement.

It interested Trotter. It interested him very much. But it no longer filled him with mingled fear and revolt. He was, indeed, no longer envious, just as he was no longer nervous. He was as calm as a Nihilist with a bomb in his pocket.

Looking up, he saw that the office boy was holding the rail gate open for him to enter. But he was conscious of no spirit of elation as he stepped through the gate and passed on into that glass-fronted cage where Pyott, the managing editor, sat like a switchman in his many-levered tower.

Trotter saw, seated at a desk before him, a thin-featured, thin-haired man of forty, with the crumpled-up eye-corners peculiar to the face that masks a circuitous and secretive mind. It was a face full of that weary concern, that alert indifferency, which is companion to the spirit of repeated compromise. It was far from an open face: it seemed to betray only two things, tiredness and satiric intelligence.

The man at the desk did not even look up. He merely flung a barbed "Well?" over his shoulder. It reminded Trotter of the preoccupied tail swish of a horse worried by a black-fly. The side flick of one casual monosyllable was plainly all he was worth. Trotter calmly sat down.

"I've been waiting for six months for a job on this paper," he began, quite seriously, quite deliberately. The man at the desk went on writing. The pen did not even stop.

"Yes?" This second monosyllable was neither an answer nor a question. It was merely an intimation that nothing of arresting moment had as yet been uttered.

"So I've come straight to you!"

"Yes!" This third exclamation was plainly a challenge to come to the issue in hand.

"I've been thrown down three----"

"Excuse me," the man at the desk had his hand on a desk 'phone standard, "but you'd better see our city editor."

Trotter laughed a little. "I've seen the city editor four times. It's no use. He only throws me out."

For the first time Pyott, the managing editor, looked up. Then he swung about in his swivel chair and stared at the youth, the somewhat narrow-chested and calm-eyed youth who had the effrontery to sit down without being asked. The calm-eyed youth seemed in no way daunted by the ordeal.

"What do you want?" was Pyott's quick and curt demand.

"I want a job."

The editor's face darkened. Trotter could see that he had angered him. He could see a lean hand shoot out and a lean finger push down on the button that sounded a buzzer in the outer office.

"There's no use doing that till you've heard what I've got to say," announced Trotter.

"Why not?" snapped the man, with a finger still on the button.

"Because your man Hubbart out there told me not to stick my nose in here till I'd made good--till I'd got a big story. And now I've got it. And I'm going to give you the biggest scoop you've printed in five years."

"That's interesting!"

"I'd never have had the nerve to face you if it wasn't."

A boy appeared through the door. The editor swung back to his desk.

"Show this gentleman the way downstairs," he said, without anger, without resentment, without interest.

Trotter stood up and stared at him. "You mean you're not going to take this beat when I've got it right here to hand out to you?" he cried in his startled and high-pitched voice. "You're not going to give me my chance?"

"What chance? What beat are you talking about?"

"A beat that involves the theft of millions of dollars!"