“Well, I’ll put you up to a good thing, if you’ll take my advice. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t have a sensation out of this business. Let the other fellows telegraph home that the chief is only shooting birds, but you and I can do better. We can get up a column apiece about the chief’s mysterious movements down here, and tell how he’s supposed to be shadowing the thieves and to be on the track of the body. I don’t want to do it alone; but if it’s in both the Age and the Transport, that will give it an appearance of truth, and we’ll have a beat on all the other fellows. Your people won’t like your coming home without sending any copy.” It was the first time that Dick had ever had such a proposition made to him, and he was indignant. “My people would rather have me come home a hundred times without copy than send them a story that was not true,” he answered. “I like a sensation, but I want it to be a real one; not one that I make myself. They trust me to tell the truth when they send me out, and I intend to do it.” “Humbug!” the Age man sneered. “Do you think the Transport always tells the truth?” “As far as I know it does,” Dick answered. “I know its reporters pretty well, and I don’t believe there is a man in the office who would knowingly send in a false report. I know that I wouldn’t for one.” The Age man said something about Dick being “too good for a newspaper man” as they returned to the office and finished up their dispatches, but Dick did not care to reply. He was sure of his ground; and it was almost with satisfaction that he noticed afterwards that the other reporters avoided the Age man--not on account of the proposition he had made, for Dick said nothing about that, but because they were able to read him through and through almost instantly, and saw that he was a man to be avoided. This is a faculty that comes quickly to a bright reporter, and it had come already to Dick to a degree that sometimes startled him. From talking with scores of new men every day--men who often had something to conceal or something to exaggerate or something to distort--he had learned to read a man’s heart and brain almost the instant he set eyes upon him. “That Tribune man is a prophet,” somebody exclaimed at supper. “He said ham and eggs, and ham and eggs it is. But they’re wonderfully better than nothing.”