"Go and get your story!"
VII
In a newspaper office, where one impression so quickly and
inevitably obliterates another, sensation is startling only in
the fact of its ephemerality. For two busy hours wave after wave
of the world's turbulence had beaten on the shoreline of the
Advance staff's attention. Every one knew, from Pyott down, that
the day was a "big" one. And since it is seldom the ever-arriving
guests of sensation which disturb a newspaper office but rather
the secondary thought of bestowing them in their right chamber
and bed and fitting them with their right "heading" night-caps,
the ordeal of the Advance's day had reached its second and most
exacting crisis. So when Pyott, the managing editor, was called
up on the wire by Obed Tyrer, the President of the First National
Trust, the call from that quarter carried with it no responsive
curiosity.
"Can you come up here right away?" demanded the banker, in a
voice of that coerced tranquillity into which the trained mind
translates itself when face to face with undue excitement.
"No; I can't! "
"Why can't you?"
"Well, among other things, I've got the trifling matter of a
paper to put to press.
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