"Where's Handlon? What happened to you? You act as if you were drunk." Bland was not in an amiable mood. "Search me," Perry managed to respond. "If Skip isn't here old man Kell must have done for him. I came back alone." "You wha-a-t?" the irate editor fairly roared, half rising from his chair. "Tell me exactly what happened and get ready to go back there on the next train. Or--no, on second thoughts you'd better go to bed. You look all used up. Handlon may be dead or dying at this minute. That Kell could do anything." He pressed the button on his desk. "Johnny," he said to the office boy, "get O'Hara in here on the double quick and tell him to bring along his hat and coat." * * * * * He turned again to Perry, who was gazing nervously at the door. "Now tell me everything that happened and make it fast," he ordered. The reporter complied, omitting nothing except the little matter of his mental lapses at the house of Professor Kell and later on the train. The incident of the drugged cigars seemed to interest the Old Man hugely, and Perry did not forget to play up Handlon's exploits in getting the picture of the Professor. All through the recital he was in a sweat for fear that he might have a recurrence of one of his brain spells and that Bland would become cognizant of it. When would the Chief finish and let him escape from the office? Desperately he fought to prevent the numbing sensation from overcoming him. All that kept him from finally fleeing the place in panic was the entrance of Jimmie O'Hara. Slight, wiry and efficient looking, this individual was a specimen of the perfect Journal reporter. This is saying a good deal, for the news crew and editorial force of the paper were a carefully selected body of men indeed. Bland never hired a man unless experience had endowed him with some unusual qualification. Most of them could write up a story with realistic exactitude, being able in most cases to supply details gleaned from actual experience in one walk of life or another. * * * * * Of this redoubtable crew probably the queerest was Jimmie O'Hara. Jimmie had just finished a sentence in the "pen" for safe-cracking at the time he landed the job with the Journal. Theoretically all men should have shunned him on account of his jailbird taint. Not so Bland. The Chief was independent in his ideas on the eternal fitness of things and allowed none of the ordinary conventions of humanity to influence his decisions. So Jimmie became one of the staff and worked hard to justify Bland in hiring him. His former profession gave him valuable sidelights upon crime stories of all kinds, and he was almost invariably picked as the man to write these up for the columns.