class="c015">312

It was a few minutes of eleven o’clock at night. One of the many editions of the great New York Herald had just gone to press. But in the big, half-lit room where editors, copy readers, reporters and telegraph operators were busy on the later editions to follow, there was no let-up in the work of making a world-known newspaper.

There was the noise of many persons working swiftly; the staccato of typewriters, the drone of telegraph sounders and now and then the sharp inquiry of some bent-over copy reader as he struggled to turn reportorial inexperience into a finished story. But there was no confusion and none of the wild rush and clatter that fiction uses in describing newspaper offices; copy boys were not dashing in all directions and the floor was not knee deep with newspapers and print paper.

Calmest of all was the night city editor. With a mind full of the work already done and in progress, he was as alert mentally as if he had just reached his desk. Five hours yet remained in which New York had to be watched; five hours, in any one minute of which the biggest news on hand might fade into nothing in the face of the one big story that every editor waits for night after night. And the night city editor, knowing this, dropped his half-lit pipe when his desk telephone buzzed.

“Stewart? Yes! Yes!” he answered quickly in a voice so low that not even his busy assistants heard him. “Where are you? What are you doing?”

“In Newark,” came the quick response, “and we landed it. It’s a peach. That aeroplane tip you know. It panned out all right.”

The night city editor had seemed perplexed for a few moments but at this his face cleared.

“How big? What’s new?”

“Biggest airship ever made; biggest planes; biggest engines—cabin and staterooms; two hundred miles an hour—”

“See it yourself?”

“Been workin’ in the factory three days; American Aeroplane Works; got story cinched. Machine flew to-night first time. It’s a beat.”