“Maybe he’s back by this time,” Mr. Emberg went on.  “Get out on the job, Newton.  Hurry, Larry, it’s close to edition-time.”

Larry sat down at his typewriter, which he had learned to operate with considerable speed, and was soon banging away at the keys.

“Shall I put in that about Mr. Potter and the new line?” he called to Mr. Emberg.

“No, I’ll have Harvey attend to that part.  You just tell of the interview in regard to supporting Reilly.  Make it a good story.”

Larry did his best, and gave a graphic picture of the leader’s headquarters, without touching on how he had come to get the information which so many other papers and reporters were anxiously waiting for.

“Here, Tommy!” called the city editor to one of the copy boys, which position Larry used to fill, “bring me Mr. Dexter’s stuff, page by page, as fast as he writes it.  I’ll get it upstairs and fix up a head for it.”

Larry smiled to hear Mr. Emberg call him “Mr. Dexter,” but, no matter how familiar an editor may become with his reporters, he gives even the youngest the title of mister when speaking of him to the copy boys.

Larry finished the first page of his story, pulled it from the typewriter and handed it to Tommy, who rushed with it to Mr. Emberg’s desk.  The editor glanced over it, made one or two corrections, changed the wording a bit, and handed it back to Tommy, who hurried with it to the pneumatic tube, in which it was shot upstairs to the composing room.

There it was taken from the metal carrier that dropped from the tube on the desk of the man in charge of distributing the various pieces of copy to the compositors.  This man put a mysterious-looking blue mark on the first page of Larry’s story.  This was to identify it later, and to make sure that all the succeeding pages would be kept together.

Then the sheet was handed to the first of a long line of compositors, who were standing in front of the desk of the “copy-cutter,” as he is called.  It was close to the hour for the first edition to go to press, and every one was in a hurry.

The compositor fairly ran to his type-setting machine and began to operate the keys, which were arranged like those on a very large typewriter.  He did not strike them, as one does who operates a typewriter, but gently touched them.  As he pressed each finger down the least bit there was a click, and from the rack above the machine there tumbled down a small piece of brass, called a “matrix.”  This contained on one edge a depression that corresponded to a letter.

In a short while enough matrixes had fallen into place to make a complete line, just the width of one of the columns of the Leader.  The compositor looked at the row of matrixes as they were, arranged before him, read it (no easy task to the uninitiated), took out a wrong letter and inserted a right one, and then pressed down a lever.

This lever operated the lead-casting machine at the back.  A plunger was shoved down into a pot of melted lead, kept molten by means of a gas flame.  A small quantity of lead was forced up against the line of matrixes, which automatically moved in a position to receive it.