added a pleasant surplus.  To put a point to his mysteriously restored favor, Mr. Greenough called up one hot morning and asked Banneker to make what speed he could to Sippiac, New Jersey.  Rioting had broken out between mill-guards and the strikers of the International Cloth Company factories, with a number of resulting fatalities.  It was a “big story.”  That Banneker was specially fitted, through his familiarity with the ground, to handle it, the city editor was not, of course, aware.

At Sippiac, Banneker found the typical industrial tragedy of that time and condition, worked out to its logical conclusion.  On the one side a small army of hired gun-men, assured of full protection and endorsement in whatever they might do:  on the other a mob of assorted foreigners, ignorant, resentful of the law, which seemed only a huge mechanism of injustice manipulated by their oppressors, inflamed by the heavy potations of a festal night carried over into the next day, and, because of the criminally lax enforcement of the law, tacitly permitted to go armed.  Who had started the clash was uncertain and, perhaps in essentials, immaterial; so perfectly and fatefully had the stage been set for mutual murder.  At the close of the fray there were ten dead.  One was a guard:  the rest, strikers or their dependents, including a woman and a six-year-old child, both shot down while running away.

By five o’clock that afternoon Banneker was in the train returning to the city with a board across his knees, writing.  Five hours later his account was finished.  At the end of his work, he had one of those ideas for “pointing” a story, mere commonplaces of journalism nowadays, which later were to give him his editorial reputation.  In the pride of his publicity-loving soul, Mr. Horace Vanney, chief owner of the International Cloth Mills, had given to Banneker a reprint of an address by himself, before some philosophical and inquiring society, wherein he had set forth some of his simpler economic theories.  A quotation, admirably apropos to Banneker’s present purposes, flashed forth clear and pregnant, to his journalistic memory.  From the Ledger “morgue” he selected one of several cuts of Mr. Vanney, and turned it in to the night desk for publication, with this descriptive note: 

Horace Vanney, Chairman of the Board of the International Cloth Company, Who declares that if working-women are paid more than a bare living wage, The surplus goes into finery and vanities which tempt them to ruin, Mr. Vanney’s mills pay girls four dollars a week.

Ravenously hungry, Banneker went out to order a long-delayed dinner at Katie’s.  Hardly had he swallowed his first mouthful of soup, when an office boy appeared.

“Mr. Gordon wants to know if you can come back to the office at once.”

On the theory that two minutes, while important to his stomach, would not greatly matter to the managing editor, Banneker consumed the rest of his soup and returned.  He found Mr. Gordon visibly disturbed.