Monday’s newspapers startled Hal Surtaine.  Despite the sympathetic attitude expressed after the riot by the other newspaper men, he had not counted upon the unanimous vigor with which the local press took up the cudgels for the “Clarion.”  That potent and profound guild-fellowship of newspaperdom, which, when once aroused, overrides all individual rivalry and jealousy, had never before come into the young editor’s experience.

To his fellow editors the issue was quite clear.  Here was an attack, not upon one newspaper alone, but upon the principle of journalistic independence.  Little as the “Banner,” the “Press,” the “Telegram,” and their like had practiced independence of thought or writing, they could both admire and uphold it in another.  Their support was as genuine as it was generous.  The police department, and, indeed, the whole city administration of Worthington, came in for scathing and universal denunciation, in that they had failed to protect the “Clarion” against the mob’s advance.

The evening papers got out special bulletins on McGuire Ellis.  None too hopeful they were, for the fighting journalist, after a brief rally, had sunk into a condition where life was the merest flicker.  Always a picturesque and well-liked personality, Ellis now became a species of popular hero.  Sympathy centralized on him, and through him attached temporarily to the “Clarion” itself, which he now typified in the public imagination.  His condition, indeed, was just so much sentimental capital to the paper, as the Honorable E.M.  Pierce savagely put it to William Douglas.  Nevertheless, the two called at the hospital to make polite inquiries, as did scores of their fellow leading citizens.  Ellis, stricken down, was serving his employer well.

Not that Hal knew this, nor, had he known it, would have cared.  Sick at heart, he waited about the hospital reception room for such meager hopes as the surgeons could give him, until an urgent summons compelled him to go to the office.  Wayne had telephoned for him half a dozen times, finally leaving a message that he must see him on a point in the tenement-ownership story, to be run on the morrow.

Wayne, at the moment of Hal’s arrival, was outside the rail talking to a visitor.  On the copy-book beside his desk was stuck an illustration proof, inverted.  Idly Hal turned it, and stood facing his final and worst ordeal of principle.  The half-tone picture, lovely, suave, alluring, smiled up into his eyes from above its caption:—­

  “Miss Esme Elliot, Society Belle and Owner of
   No. 9 Sadler’s Shacks, Known as the Pest-Egg."

“You’ve seen it,” said Wayne’s voice at his elbow.

“Yes.”

“Well; it was that I wanted to ask you about.”

“Ask it,” said Hal, dry-lipped.

“I knew you were a—­a friend of Miss Elliot’s.  We can kill it out yet.  It—­it isn’t absolutely necessary to the story,” he added, pityingly.