He had sent the “cub” because, as he grimly said, “sometimes these absolutely green hands can get what the old, seasoned newspaper veterans can’t get. They have a reputation to earn instead of sustain, and a man will do more impossible feats to earn fame than to keep it.”

The particular “cub” reporter assigned to this particular work with the veteran Barnes was a young man by the name of Logan. He had claimed to be an expert photographer, and Barnes had hired him as an experiment for a week, thinking he looked unusually ambitious.

Another hour slipped by, and Mr. Carter simply boiled over. He jerked the telephone receiver off the hood and called up Grey’s number. But although he savagely called the operator to keep trying to get through, he received no answer, and was just throwing the receiver back when the new reporter came running in.

There was a look on the boy’s face that stopped even Carter’s tongue at the sight of him. As a general practice, no reporter, old or young, would have rushed into Carter’s office in this fashion, but Carter saw in a second that something tremendous, at least to the boy, had occurred.

Logan held the negative of a photographic plate in his hand, and after an ineffectual stammer, exclaimed, “Mr. Carter—look—at that! I climbed into the kitchen through a window at Grey’s, got up on a table, and opened a transom to get a time exposure of the man you wanted. He was talking with Mr. Grey and the other man, Mr. Maxwell. I ran all the way back here and have just come from the developing room. And I ask you to look at that!”

Carter took the bit of glass and held it up to the light. It was perfectly clear, not a shadow of any sort visible on it. “Well, what of that—you—” Carter swore. “Something’s wrong with your plate, or your developing, or your focus. Go out again and don’t come back until you get what I sent you for!”

“There was nothing wrong with the plate, the focus, or the developing,” Logan replied doggedly.

“No? That’s right. The only thing wrong is your stupid self. Do you mean to tell me—”

“Mr. Carter!” the boy broke in eagerly. “I can’t understand it. Everything was right as it could be. I have been using the same plates all along, and—”

But Jasper Carter was beside himself. He roared at Logan, “Get out! And if you can’t come back with what I want, don’t come back at all!”

He fairly drove Logan out of the office and slammed the door shut. This door usually stood open to the hall which connected all the other editors’ rooms. But Carter was so enraged at what he considered the cub reporter’s stupidity that he did not want to see anyone for a while. So he turned savagely, and after one or two walks across the room, he heard the door open and Barnes came in.