He would have mentioned all of these things to McClintock if the latter hadn’t made such an abrupt departure. He told himself now that even if he had been able to voice them the manager wouldn’t have comprehended the impossible nature of the task he had so casually mapped out. Folks who haven’t smelt the smell of the paste-pot and heard the presses roar usually have the weirdest sort of naive notions concerning just what and just what cannot be done in the way of either inserting news in the columns of a great metropolitan daily or keeping it out. “The acid test”—Jimmy kept remembering these three words and the oftener they recurred to him the more distressed he became. He sat hunched up in his chair looking out into the pouring rain and consuming cigarettes at a most alarming rate. At about the middle of the sixth cigarette he straightened up; at the beginning of the seventh he arose and began to pace the floor while a new idea slowly unfolded in his active mind; when he was two puffs into the eighth he flung it into a corner with a resolute sweep of his arm, dived for the telephone, called up “Beekman 4,000,” and impatiently joggled the hook until a response came. “Hello, World?” he said jerkily, “give me the city desk ... hello ... city desk?... Who is that? McCarthy?... Say, Mr. McCarthy, this is Martin of Jollyland—Martin—M-A-R-T-I-N—publicity director of Jollyland—raining here? You betcha—say, I’ve got something pretty good for you ... hot stuff.... Be on the lookout for it, will you?—Dope?—No, sir, this is the real goods. No fooling—on the level—you can expect it before midnight. Good-bye.” In the next ten minutes Jimmy, in a frenzy of feverish haste, called up the city desks of all the other morning papers and repeated practically the same message to each. Then he ordered three messenger boys to report to him in half an hour, stuck six sheets of carbon between seven long sheets of copy paper, inserted the numerous layers in his typewriter and began to pound out, with ever increasing speed, a narrative that was to either make or break him. * * * * * It was nearly midnight when an office boy dropped a long manila envelope marked “NEWS—RUSH” on the desk in front of Larry McCarthy, night city editor of the World. The early mail edition had gone to press ten minutes before and McCarthy had just come up for air for a brief interval before plunging into the final activities of the night. The tension had relaxed and he was joking with the managing editor who had stopped to give a few parting instructions on his way home.