“Please give me the story,” pleaded Larry, and he got the tale in detail, and what was more, he and Dick Hamilton became so friendly that the young millionaire promised to keep the story from all other reporters; so that Larry scored another beat, much to his own satisfaction and the satisfaction of his friends.

“Keep on and you’ll be at the top,” said the city editor, and then he went on:  “Here is something else you might look into, Larry.  It might make a fine thing for the Sunday supplement.  You can go up there, get the yarn, and you needn’t come back to-day.  Write it up the first thing in the morning.”

“What sort of story is it?” asked Larry.

“Why, it’s a postal, from an old German, I take it, who says he has invented a flying machine.”

“I guess he’s about the only one in ten thousand who has been successful then,” answered Larry, smiling.

“Oh, I don’t suppose it amounts to anything,” went on Mr. Emberg.  “But it may make a good story to let the old gentleman talk, and describe the machine.  The public likes stories about flying machines and queer inventors, even if the machines don’t work.  Get a good yarn, for we need one for the first page of the supplement.  I’ll sent Sneed, the photographer, up later to get some pictures of it.”

The city editor handed Larry a postal card, poorly written and spelled, on which there was a request that a reporter be sent to a certain address on the East Side, to get a story of a wonderful invention, destined to revolutionize methods of travel.

It was not the first time Larry had been sent on this sort of an assignment.  Once he had gone to get a story of a new kind of gas lamp a man had invented, and the thing had exploded while he was watching the owner demonstrate it.  Luckily neither of them were hurt.

Larry found the address given on the postal was in a dilapidated tenement, seemingly deserted, and standing some distance away from other buildings.

When he got there he ran into a reporter named Fritsch, who worked on a German newspaper.

“Dot inventor vos mofed avay,” said the German reporter.  “Some beoples told me he vos krazy.”

“Is the house vacant?” asked Larry.

“I dink so.  Maype ve walk through him, yah?”

Larry was willing, and together the pair went into the tenement and upstairs.

As they passed through one of the halls Larry looked up and saw a man peering down at him over a balustrade.  He gave a gasp.

“Vot it is?” questioned the German reporter.

“That man!” cried Larry.  He ran up the stairs and tried to catch the individual, who was running away.

The man was the person he had helped to rescue from the ocean—­the one who had given his name as Mah Retto.

The strange man entered a side room and locked the door.  Larry knocked, but nobody answered his summons.

“Dot vos not der inventor,” said Fritsch.