“I hear you’ve got a sucking genius at your shop.”

“If you mean Banneker, he’s weaned,” replied the assistant city editor of The Ledger.  “He goes on space next week.”

“Does he, though!  Quick work, eh?”

“A record for the office.  He’s been on the staff less than a year.”

“Is he really such a wonder?” asked Glidden of The Monitor.

Three or four Ledger men answered at once, citing various stories which had stirred the interest of Park Row.

“Oh, you Ledger fellows are always giving the college yell for each other,” said McHale, impatiently voicing the local jealousy of The Ledger’s recognized esprit de corps.  “I’ve seen bigger rockets than him come down in the ash-heap.”

“He won’t,” prophesied Tommy Burt, The Ledger’s humorous specialist.  “He’ll go up and stay up.  High!  He’s got the stuff.”

“They say,” observed Fowler, the star man of The Patriot, “he covers his assignment in taxicabs.”

“He gets the news,” murmured Mallory, summing up in that phrase all the encomiums which go to the perfect praise of the natural-born reporter.

“And he writes it,” put in Van Cleve of The Courier.  “Lord, how that boy can write!  Why, a Banneker two-sticks stands out as if it were printed in black-face.”

“I’ve never seen him around,” remarked Glidden.  “What does he do with himself besides work?”

“Nothing, I imagine,” answered Mallory.  “One of the cubs reports finding him at the Public Library, before ten o’clock in the morning, surrounded by books on journalism.  He’s a serious young owl.”

“It doesn’t get into his copy, then,” asserted “Parson” Gale, political expert for The Ledger.

“Nor into his appearance.  He certainly dresses like a flower of the field.  Even the wrinkles in his clothes have the touch of high-priced Fifth Avenue.”

“Must be rich,” surmised Fowler.  “Taxis for assignments and Fifth-Avenue raiment sound like real money.”

“Nobody knows where he got it, then,” said Tommy Burt.  “Used to be a freight brakeman or something out in the wild-and-woolly.  When he arrived, he was dressed very proud and stiff like a Baptist elder going to make a social call, all but the made-up bow tie and the oil on the hair.  Some change and sudden!”

“Got a touch of the swelled head, though, hasn’t he?” asked Van Cleve.  “I hear he’s beginning to pick his assignments already.  Refuses to take society stuff and that sort of thing.”

“Oh,” said Mallory, “I suppose that comes from his being assigned to a tea given by the Thatcher Forbes for some foreign celebrity, and asking to be let off because he’d already been invited there and declined.”

“Hello!” exclaimed McHale.  “Where does our young bird come in to fly as high as the Thatcher Forbes?  He may look like a million dollars, but is he?”

“All I know,” said Tommy Burt, “is that every Monday, which is his day off, he dines at Sherry’s, and goes in lonely glory to a first-night, if there is one, afterward.  It must have been costing him half of his week’s salary.”