"Well, what's your name?" said Hall just as if he was very much interested. "My name's Pat." "Tell him your big name," prompted Peter. "Go ahead." "Peter Neale, second." "I suppose you'll be down here doing baseball yourself pretty soon now that you're getting to be such a big boy," said Hall. Pat picked up the funny paper again and pretended to become engrossed in it. Charlie Hall was diverted back to the first of the Peter Neales. "I guess he's a little older than my youngest," he said. "Let me see, Joe--no, that's not the one I mean--Bill must be about four or five now. Just around there." "Pat's older than that. He was six a couple of days ago." "Getting pretty near time to begin figuring what to do with him." "I know that already," said Peter, "he's going to be a newspaper man. He's going to be 'by Peter Neale'." "I'd drown mine, all six of 'em, before I'd let 'em go into the newspaper business." "What's the matter with it?" "It don't get you any place. Now if I was in business I'd be just getting ready to be a president of the company or something. And as it is I'm just an old man around the shop. Forty-two my last birthday. In a couple of years more I'll be on the copy desk." "That's mostly bunk, Charlie. But even if it was so, haven't you had a lot of fun?" "What do you mean, fun?" "Going out where things are happening and writing pieces and seeing them in the paper the next day. Just writing a baseball story seems sort of exciting to me." "Hell," said Charlie, "they're all faked, those baseball games. I wouldn't go across the street to see one." He paused, but went on again before Peter could protest. "It's a funny thing, but the longer you stay in newspaper work the more it gets to seem as if everything's faked. After a while you find out that all the murders are just alike. Somebody sleeps with somebody and somebody else don't like it and then you have what we call a 'mystery' and we get all steamed up about it. Railroad accidents--the engineer disregarded the signal--fires--somebody dropped a cigarette in a pile of waste. My God, Pete, there's only about ten things can happen any place in the world and then they must go on repeating themselves over and over." Peter rushed in pellmell. "But don't you see, Charlie. It's the writing about them makes them different. A piano player might as well say, 'I haven't got anything but the same notes.'"