The _Sun’s_ tug raced to sea and soon came alongside the overdue steamer. On board was Frank Marshall White, the _Sun’s_ London correspondent, and he had, all ready written, a story telling how the Umbria broke her machinery, and how the chief engineer lay on his back for five days trying to mend the break. Fitzgerald took White’s story and raced to Quarantine, where there was a telegraph-station, but, at that hour, no operator. Fitzgerald, himself an expert telegrapher, pounded the _Sun’s_ call, “SX,” for ten minutes, but the _Sun_ operator had gone home. Fitzgerald returned to the tug and went under full speed to the Battery, landing at 3.35 A.M. Running to Park Row, he found an assistant foreman of the _Sun_ composing-room enjoying his lemonade in Andy Horn’s restaurant. This man rounded up four or five printers, and they began setting up the story at 4 A.M. The _Sun_ had a complete and exclusive story, and twenty thousand copies were sold of Fitzgerald’s extra. Vila, like Fitzgerald a man of large physique and a former athlete, wrote the descriptions of a dozen Suburban Handicaps and Futurities, of a score of great college rowing-matches, of a thousand baseball and football games. Damon Runyon, the poet and sporting editor, once remarked that “Vila is the only sporting writer I have ever seen who knows exactly, at the end of a sporting event, just what he is going to write, when he is going to write it, and how much he is going to write.” When John W. Gates and John A. Drake came to the New York race-tracks and made bets of sensational magnitude, Vila was the only turf reporter able to give the exact figures of the amounts bet by the Western plungers. The printing of these in the _Sun_ so aroused the Jockey Club that a curb was put on big betting. The present sports staff includes some of the writers, like Nat Fleischer, “Daniel,” Frederick G. Lieb, and George B. Underwood, who were on the big sports staff of the New York _Press_ when that paper was amalgamated with the _Sun_.