Greenough showed the paragraph (which failed to appear at all in the overcrowded paper of next morning) to Mr. Gordon.

“The new man doesn’t start well,” he remarked.  “Too little imaginative interest.”

“Isn’t it knowledge rather than lack of interest?” suggested the managing editor.

“It may come to the same thing.  If he knows too much to get really interested, he’ll be a dull reporter.”

“I doubt whether you’ll find him dull,” smiled Mr. Gordon.  “But he may find his job dull.  In that case, of course he’d better find another.”

Indeed, that was the danger which, for weeks to follow, Banneker skirted.  Police news, petty and formal, made up his day’s work.  Had he sought beneath the surface of it the underlying elements, and striven to express these, his matter as it came to the desk, however slight the technical news value might have been, would have afforded the watchful copy-readers, trained to that special selectiveness as only The Ledger could train its men, opportunity of judging what potentialities might lurk beneath the crudities of the “cub.”  But Banneker was not crude.  He was careful.  His sense of the relative importance of news, acquired by those weeks of intensive analysis before applying for his job, was too just to let him give free play to his pen.  What was the use?  The “story” wasn’t worth the space.

Nevertheless, 3 T 9901, which Banneker was already too cognoscent to employ in his formal newsgathering (the notebook is anathema to the metropolitan reporter), was filling up with odd bits, which were being transferred, in the weary hours when the new man sat at his desk with nothing to do, to paper in the form of sketches for Miss Westlake’s trustful and waiting typewriter.  Nobody could say that Banneker was not industrious.  Among his fellow reporters he soon acquired the melancholy reputation of one who was forever writing “special stuff,” none of which ever “landed.”  It was chiefly because of his industry and reliability, rather than any fulfillment of the earlier promise of brilliant worth as shown in the Sunday Sphere articles, that he got his first raise to twenty dollars.  It surprised rather than gratified him.

He went to Mr. Gordon about it.  The managing editor was the kind of man with whom it is easy to talk straight talk.

“What’s the matter with me?” asked Banneker.

Mr. Gordon played a thoughtful tattoo upon his fleshy knuckles with the letter-opener.  “Nothing.  Aren’t you satisfied?”

“No.  Are you?”

“You’ve had your raise, and fairly early.  Unless you had been worth it, you wouldn’t have had it.”

“Am I doing what you expected of me?”

“Not exactly.  But you’re developing into a sure, reliable reporter.”

“A routine man,” commented Banneker.

“After all, the routine man is the backbone of the office.”  Mr. Gordon executed a fantasia on his thumb.  “Would you care to try a desk job?” he asked, peering at Banneker over his glasses.