None of his new acquaintances volunteered information as to the mechanism of his new job.  Apparently he was expected to figure that out for himself.  By nature reticent, and trained in an environment which still retained enough of frontier etiquette to make a scrupulous incuriosity the touchstone of good manners and perhaps the essence of self-preservation, Banneker asked no questions.  He sat and waited.

One by one the other reporters were summoned by name to the city desk, and dispatched with a few brief words upon the various items of the news.  Presently Banneker found himself alone, in the long files of desks.  For an hour he sat there and for a second hour.  It seemed a curious way in which to be earning fifteen dollars a week.  He wondered whether he was expected to sit tight at his desk.  Or had he the freedom of the office?  Characteristically choosing the more active assumption, he found his way to the current newspaper files.  They were like old friends.

“Mr. Banneker.”  An office boy was at his elbow.  “Mr. Greenough wants you.”

Conscious of a quickened pulse, and annoyed at himself because of it, the tyro advanced to receive his maiden assignment.  The epochal event was embodied in the form of a small clipping from an evening paper, stating that a six-year-old boy had been fatally burned at a bonfire near the North River.  Banneker, Mr. Greenough instructed him mildly, was to make inquiries of the police, of the boy’s family, of the hospital, and of such witnesses as he could find.

Quick with interest he caught up his hat and hurried out.  Death, in the sparsely populated country wherefrom he hailed, was a matter of inclusive local importance; he assumed the same of New York.  Three intense hours he devoted to an item which any police reporter of six months’ standing would have rounded up in a brace of formal inquiries, and hastened back, brimful of details for Mr. Greenough.

“Good!  Good!” interpolated that blandly approving gentleman from time to time in the course of the narrative.  “Write it, Mr. Banneker! write it.”

“How much shall I write?”

“Just what is necessary to tell the news.”

Behind the amiable smile which broadened without lighting up the sub-Mongol physiognomy of the city editor, Banneker suspected something.  As he sat writing page after page, conscientiously setting forth every germane fact, the recollection of that speculative, estimating smile began to play over the sentences with a dire and blighting beam.  Three fourths of the way through, the writer rose, went to the file-board and ran through a dozen newspapers.  He was seeking a ratio, a perspective.  He wished to determine how much, in a news sense, the death of the son of an obscure East-Side plasterer was worth.  On his return he tore up all that he had written, and substituted a curt paragraph, without character or color, which he turned in.  He had gauged the value of the tragedy accurately, in the light of his study of news files.