Then, an idea seemed to strike him. He rang the telephone with fury, and it didn't improve his temper to hear the saucy little central informing her elbow mate that "that ol' fellah wuz burnin' the wire up alive." "Is that 'The Herald'? Brydges there? That you, Brydges? Listen, the night you were up on the Ridge, have you any perfect proof that Wayland didn't go down when you were asleep? Eh? You turned in at ten; and you found him still stamping about at twelve? Is that it? What? No? Don't be a damphool, _cut that out_. Of course, he didn't go down to the Ranch House. Cut that whole scandal thing out. There's nothing in it; but I think we can locate our missing knight errant. Understand? He's got to be smashed? What? _You had printed the scandal story before you ever came in to me at all_? Dictated it right in to the typo machines? In the 'Independent'? Oh, well, I'm glad it didn't go in the 'City Herald'? But it did go in; one evening paper?" Then the wrath of the strong man broke bounds. If he had been a stage villain the curtain drop would have fallen on a red faced gentleman pounding the desk, tearing at the telephone, hurling his chair about the office and generally, as the saucy little central remarked, "eating the wire up alive." When Brydges' chief indulged in explosives that necessitated the repair of furniture the next day, the handy man always stood strictly and silently at attention. He knew the meaning of the stage thunder: it was the trick of the Indian medicine man, who fires guns to bring down rain. Bat knew that the fulminations were of a piece with all the other orders to do and not to do, an effort to get results while diverting the thunderbolt from the rain maker's head; for by one of those strange contingencies that Shakespeare defines as an opportunity of evil, when the handy man had gone to the 'Herald,' the news editor chanced to be out. Bat crossed to the 'Independent's' office. It lacked but half an hour of the time to lock up the press, and on condition that the story should be "a scoop," Bat was sent out to the composing room to dictate straight to the printer, standing over the linotype machine.