Mallory jumped in his chair.  “Banneker!” he exclaimed.  “Oh, hell!” he added disconsolately.

“Takes the shine out of the story, doesn’t it?” observed Burt with a malicious smile.

One of the anomalous superstitions of newspaperdom is that nothing which happens to a reporter in the line of his work is or can be “big news.”  The mere fact that he is a reporter is enough to blight the story.

“What was Banneker doing down there?” queried Mr. Greenough.

“Visiting on a yacht.”

“Is that so?” There was a ray of hope in the other’s face.  The glamour of yachting association might be made to cast a radiance about the event, in which the damnatory fact that the principal figure was a mere reporter could be thrown into low relief.  Such is the view which journalistic snobbery takes of the general public’s snobbery.  “Whose yacht?”

Again the spiteful little smile appealed on Burt’s lips as he dashed the rising hope.  “Fentriss Smith’s.”

And again the expletive of disillusion burst from between Mallory’s teeth as he saw the front-page double-column spread, a type-specialty of the usually conservative Ledger upon which it prided itself, dwindle to a carefully handled inside-page three-quarter of a column.

“You say that Mr. Banneker is in the police station?” asked the city editor.

“Or at headquarters.  They’re probably working the third degree on him.”

“That won’t do,” declared the city desk incumbent, with conviction.  He caught up the telephone, got the paper’s City Hall reporter, and was presently engaged in some polite but pointed suggestions to His Honor the Mayor.  Shortly after, Police Headquarters called; the Chief himself was on the wire.

“The Ledger is behind Mr. Banneker, Chief,” said Mr. Greenough crisply.  “Carrying concealed weapons?  If your men in that precinct were fit to be on the force, there would be no need for private citizens to go armed.  You get the point, I see.  Good-bye.”

“Unless I am a bad guesser we’ll have Banneker back here by evening.  And there’ll be no manhandling in his case,” Mallory said to Burt.

Counsel was taken of Mr. Gordon, as soon as that astute managing editor arrived, as to the handling of the difficult situation.  The Ledger, always cynically intolerant of any effort to better the city government, as savoring of “goo-gooism,” which was its special bete noire, could not well make the shooting a basis for a general attack upon police laxity, though it was in this that lay the special news possibility of the event.  On the other hand, the thing was far too sensational to be ignored or too much slurred.

Andreas, the assistant managing editor, in charge of the paper’s make-up, a true news-hound with an untainted delight in the unusual and striking, no matter what its setting might be, who had been called into the conference, advocated “smearing it all over the front page, with Banneker’s first-hand statement for the lead—­pictures too.”