“After all, that fellow was a reporter and a very clever one. He didn’t want to buy the boat or its cargo or anything else. But I wonder if he was an artist also. If not, who made those pictures?” “Well,” said Irv, “you remember there was a young woman who came on board about the same time that he did. She was very much interested in Baby, but I noticed that she went all over the boat, and when you and that young fellow were talking, she sat down on the anchor, there, and seemed to be writing a letter on a pad. Just then, as I remember, we fellows were gathered around the new lantern you had just bought and examining it--and, by the way, here’s the lantern in the group picture.” All this was a revelation to Phil, and it interested him mightily. As for Irv Strong, he was so interested that he made up his mind to beard the lion in his den. He went to the office of one of the newspapers and asked to see its editor. But out of him he got no satisfaction whatever. The editor hadn’t the slightest idea where the interviews or the pictures had come from. “All that,” he said, “is managed by our news department. I never know what they are going to do. I judge them only by results. But I do not mind saying to you that there would have been several peremptory discharges in this office if this paper had not had a good picture of _The Last of the Flatboats_, a portrait of your interesting young captain and other pictures of human interest tending to illustrate the arrival of this boat at our landing, although we rarely print pictures of any kind in our paper. This is an exceptional case. And I think that the chief of our news department would have had an uncomfortable quarter of an hour if he and his subordinates had failed to secure a talk with persons so interesting as those who captured Jim Hughes, as he is called, and secured the arrest of the others of that bank burglar’s gang, and afterward rescued one of the most distinguished citizens of Mississippi and his family from death by starvation. Really, you must excuse me from undertaking the task of telling you how our boys do these things. It is not my business to know, and I have a great many other things to do. It is their business to get the news. For that they are responsible, and to that end they have control of adequate means. Oh, by the way, that suggests to me a good editorial that ought to be written right now. Perhaps you will be interested to read it in to-morrow morning’s paper. I am just going to write it.” As it was now midnight, Irv was bewildered. How in the world was he to read in the next morning’s paper an editorial that had, at this hour, just occurred to the man who was yet to write it? How was it to be written, set up in type, and printed before that early hour when the newspaper must be on sale?