"You know what this means, don't you?" he delightedly commented. "A grand jury investigation. Oh, listen to the band!" Before noon the Merchants' and the Planters' and Traders' Banks had withdrawn their advertisements. At about the same hour a particularly atrocious murder was committed in one of the suburbs. Up in the reporters' room of the police station, Thomas, of the _Bulletin_, and Graham, of the _Chronicle_, were indulging in a quiet game of whist with two of the morning newspaper boys, when a roundsman stepped to the door and called Graham out. Graham came back a moment later after his coat, with such studied nonchalance that the other boys, eternally suspicious as police reporters grow to be, looked at him narrowly, and Thomas asked him, also with studied nonchalance: "The candy-store girl, or the one in the laundry office?" "Business, young fellow, business," returned Graham loftily. "I guess the _Chronicle_ knows when it has a good man. I'm called into the office to save the paper. They're sending a cub down to cover the afternoon. Don't scoop him, old man." "Not unless I get a chance," promised Thomas, but after Graham had gone he went down to the desk and, still unsatisfied, asked: "Anything doing, Lieut.?" "Dead as a door-nail," replied the lieutenant, and Thomas, still with an instinct that something was wrong, still sensitive to a certain suppressed tingling excitement about the very atmosphere of the place, went slowly back to the reporters' room, where he spent a worried half-hour. The noonday edition of the _Chronicle_ carried, in the identical columns devoted in the _Bulletin_ to a further attack on Stone, a lurid account of the big murder; and the _Bulletin_ had not a line of it! A sharp call from Brown to Thomas, at central police, apprised the latter that he had been "scooped," and brought out the facts in the case. Thomas hurried down-stairs and bitterly upbraided Lieutenant Casper. "Look here, you Thomas," snapped Casper; "you _Bulletin_ guys have been too fresh around here for a long time." In Casper's eyes--Casper with whom he had always been on cordial joking terms--he saw cruel implacability, and, furious, he knew himself to be "in" for that most wearing of all newspaper jobs--"doing police" for a paper that was "in bad" with the administration. He needed no one to tell him the cause. At three-thirty, Thomas, and Camden, who was doing the city hall, and Greenleaf Whittier Squiggs, who was subbing for the day on the courts, appeared before Jim Brown in an agonized body. Thomas had been scooped on the big murder, Camden and G. W. Squiggs had been scooped, at the city hall and the county building, on the only items worth while, and they were all at white heat; though it was a great consolation to Squiggs, after all, to find himself in such distinguished company.