Out of the open West which, under the rigor of the game, keeps its temper and its poise, Banneker had brought the knack of setting his teeth and smiling so serenely that one never even perceived the teeth to be set behind the smile.  This ability stood him in good stead now.  In his time of enforced leisure he bethought himself of the sketches which Miss Westlake had typed.  With his just and keen perception, he judged them not to be magazine matter.  But they might do as “Sunday stuff.”  He turned in half a dozen of them to Mr. Homans.  When next he saw them they were lying, in uncorrected proof, on the managing editor’s desk while Mr. Gordon gently rapped his knuckles over them.

“Where did you get the idea for these, Mr. Banneker?” he asked.

“I don’t know.  It came to me.”

“Would you care to sign them?”

“Sign them?” repeated the reporter in surprise, for this was a distinction afforded to only a choice few on the conservative Ledger.

“Yes.  I’m going to run them on the editorial page.  Do us some more and keep them within the three-quarters.  What’s your full name?”

“I’d like to sign them ‘Eban,’” answered the other, after some thought.  “And thank you.”

Assignments or no assignments, thereafter Banneker was able to fill his idle time.  Made adventurous by the success of the “Vagrancies,” he next tried his hand at editorials on light or picturesque topics, and with satisfying though not equal results, for here he occasionally stumbled upon the hard-rooted prejudices of the Inside Office, and beheld his efforts vanish into the irreclaimable limbo of the scrap-basket.  Nevertheless, at ten dollars per column for this kind of writing, he continued to make a decent space bill, and clear himself of the doldrums where the waning of the city desk’s favor had left him.  All that he could now make he needed, for his change of domicile had brought about a corresponding change of habit and expenditure into which he slipped imperceptibly.  To live on fifteen dollars a week, plus his own small income, which all went for “extras,” had been simple, at Mrs. Brashear’s.  To live on fifty at the Regalton was much more of a problem.  Banneker discovered that he was a natural spender.  The discovery caused him neither displeasure nor uneasiness.  He confidently purposed to have money to spend; plenty of it, as a mere, necessary concomitant to other things that he was after.  Good reporters on space, working moderately, made from sixty to seventy-five dollars a week.  Banneker set himself a mark of a hundred dollars.  He intended to work very hard ... if Mr. Greenough would give him a chance.

Mr. Greenough’s distribution of the day’s news continued to be distinctly unfavorable to the new space-man.  The better men on the staff began to comment on the city desk’s discrimination.  Banneker had, for a time, shone in heroic light:  his feat had been honorable, not only to The Ledger office, but to the entire craft of reporting.  In the investigation he had borne himself with unexceptionable modesty and equanimity.  That he should be “picked on” offended that generous esprit de corps which was natural to the office.  Tommy Burt was all for referring the matter to Mr. Gordon.