"Katie's" sits, sedate and serviceable, on a narrow side street so near to Park Row that the big table in the rear rattles its dishes when the presses begin their seismic rumblings, in the daily effort to shake the world. Here gather the pick and choice of New York journalism, while still on duty, to eat and drink and discuss the inner news of things which is so often much more significant than the published version; haply to win or lose a few swiftly earned dollars at pass-three hearts. It is the unofficial press club of Newspaper Row.

Said McHale of The Sphere, who, having been stuck with the queen of spades--that most unlucky thirteener--twice in succession, was retiring on his losses, to Mallory of The Ledger who had just come in:

"I hear you've got a sucking genius at your shop."

"If you mean Banneker, he's weaned," replied the assistant city editor of The Ledger. "He goes on space next week."

"Does he, though! Quick work, eh?"

"A record for the office. He's been on the staff less than a year."

"Is he really such a wonder?" asked Glidden of The Monitor.

Three or four Ledger men answered at once, citing various stories which had stirred the interest of Park Row.

"Oh, you Ledger fellows are always giving the college yell for each other," said McHale, impatiently voicing the local jealousy of The Ledger's recognized _esprit de corps_. "I've seen bigger rockets than him come down in the ash-heap."

"He won't," prophesied Tommy Burt, The Ledger's humorous specialist. "He'll go up and stay up. High! He's got the stuff."

"They say," observed Fowler, the star man of The Patriot, "he covers his assignment in taxicabs."

"He gets the news," murmured Mallory, summing up in that phrase all the encomiums which go to the perfect praise of the natural-born reporter.

"And he writes it," put in Van Cleve of The Courier. "Lord, how that boy can write! Why, a Banneker two-sticks stands out as if it were printed in black-face."

"I've never seen him around," remarked Glidden. "What does he do with himself besides work?"

"Nothing, I imagine," answered Mallory. "One of the cubs reports finding him at the Public Library, before ten o'clock in the morning, surrounded by books on journalism. He's a serious young owl."

"It doesn't get into his copy, then," asserted "Parson" Gale, political expert for The Ledger.

"Nor into his appearance. He certainly dresses like a flower of the field. Even the wrinkles in his clothes have the touch of high-priced Fifth Avenue."

"Must be rich," surmised Fowler. "Taxis for assignments and Fifth-Avenue raiment sound like real money."

"Nobody knows where he got it, then," said Tommy Burt. "Used to be a freight brakeman or something out in the wild-and-woolly. When he arrived, he was dressed very proud and stiff like a Baptist elder going to make a social call, all but the made-up bow tie and the oil on the hair. Some change and sudden!"

"Got a touch of the swelled head, though, hasn't he?" asked Van Cleve. "I hear he's beginning to pick his assignments already. Refuses to take society stuff and that sort of thing."

"Oh," said Mallory, "I suppose that comes from his being assigned to a tea given by the Thatcher Forbes for some foreign celebrity, and asking to be let off because he'd already been invited there and declined."

"Hello!" exclaimed McHale. "Where does our young bird come in to fly as high as the Thatcher Forbes? He may look like a million dollars, but is he?"

"All I know," said Tommy Burt, "is that every Monday, which is his day off, he dines at Sherry's, and goes in lonely glory to a first-night, if there is one, afterward. It must have been costing him half of his week's salary."

"Swelled head, sure," diagnosed Decker, the financial reporter of The Ledger. "Well, watch the great Chinese joss, Greenough, pull the props from under him when the time comes."

"As how?" inquired Glidden.

"By handing him a nawsty one out of the assignment book, just to show him where his hat fits too tight."

"A run of four-line obits," suggested Van Cleve, who had passed a painful apprenticeship of death-notices in which is neither profitable space nor hopeful opportunity, "for a few days, will do it."

"Or the job of asking an indignant millionaire papa why his pet daughter ran away with the second footman and where."

"Or interviewing old frozen-faced Willis Enderby on his political intentions, honorable or dishonorable."

"If I know Banneker," said Mallory, "he's game. He'll take what's handed him and put it over."

"Once, maybe," contributed Tommy Burt. "Twice, perhaps. But I wouldn't want to crowd too much on him."

"Greenough won't. He's wise in the ways of marvelous and unlicked cubs," said Decker.

"Why? What do you think Banneker would do?" asked Mallory curiously, addressing Burt.

"If he got an assignment too rich for his stomach? Well, speaking unofficially and without special knowledge, I'd guess that he'd handle it to a finish, and then take his very smart and up-to-date hat and perform a polite adieu to Mr. Greenough and all the works of The Ledger city room."

A thin, gray, somnolent elder at the end of the table, whose nobly cut face was seared with lines of physical pain endured and outlived, withdrew a very small pipe from his mouth and grunted.

"The Venerable Russell Edmonds has the floor," said Tommy Burt in a voice whose open raillery subtly suggested an underlying affection and respect. "He snorts, and in that snort is sublimated the wisdom and experience of a ripe ninety years on Park Row. Speak, O Compendium of all the--"

"Shut up, Tommy," interrupted Edmonds. He resumed his pipe, gave it two anxious puffs, and, satisfied of its continued vitality, said:

"Banneker, uh? Resign, uh? You think he would?"

"I think so."

"Does _he_ think so?"

"That's my belief."

"He won't," pronounced the veteran with finality. "They never do. They chafe. They strain. They curse out the job and themselves. They say it isn't fit for any white man. So it isn't, the worst of it. But they stick. If they're marked for it, they stick."

"Marked for it?" murmured Glidden.

"The ink-spot. The mark of the beast. I've got it. You've got it, Glidden, and you, McHale. Mallory's smudged with it. Tommy thinks it's all over him, but it isn't. He'll end between covers. Fiction, like as not," he added with a mildly contemptuous smile. "But this young Banneker; it's eaten into him like acid."

"Do you know him, Pop?" inquired McHale.

"Never saw him. Don't have to. I've read his stuff."

"And you see it there?"

"Plain as Brooklyn Bridge. He'll eat mud like the rest of us."

"Come off, Pop! Where do you come in to eat mud? You've got the creamiest job on Park Row. You never have to do anything that a railroad president need shy at."

This was nearly true. Edmonds, who in his thirty years of service had filled almost every conceivable position from police headquarters reporter to managing editor, had now reverted to the phase for which the ink-spot had marked him, and was again a reporter; a sort of super-reporter, spending much of his time out around the country on important projects either of news, or of that special information necessary to a great daily, which does not always appear as news, but which may define, determine, or alter news and editorial policies.

Of him it was said on Park Row, and not without reason, that he was bigger than his paper, which screened him behind a traditional principle of anonymity, for The Courier was of the second rank in metropolitan journalism and wavered between an indigenous Bourbonism and a desire to be thought progressive. The veteran's own creed was frankly socialistic; but in the Fabian phase. His was a patient philosophy, content with slow progress; but upon one point he was a passionate enthusiast. He believed in the widest possible scope of education, and in the fundamental duty of the press to stimulate it.

"We'll get the Social Revolution just as soon as we're educated up to it," he was wont to declare. "If we get it before then, it'll be a worse hash than capitalism. So let's go slow and learn."

For such a mind to be contributing to an organ of The Courier type might seem anomalous. Often Edmonds accused himself of shameful compromise; the kind of compromise constantly necessary to hold his place. Yet it was not any consideration of self-interest that bound him. He could have commanded higher pay in half a dozen open positions. Or, he could have afforded to retire, and write as he chose, for he had been a shrewd investor with wide opportunities. What really held him was his ability to forward almost imperceptibly through the kind of news political and industrial, which he, above all other journalists of his day, was able to determine and analyze, the radical projects dear to his heart. Nothing could have had a more titillating appeal to his sardonic humor than the furious editorial refutations in The Courier, of facts and tendencies plainly enunciated by him in the news columns.

Nevertheless, his impotency to speak out openly and individually the faith that was in him, left always a bitter residue in his mind. It now informed his answer to Van Cleve's characterization of his job.

"If I can sneak a tenth of the truth past the copy-desk," he said, "I'm doing well. And what sort of man am I when I go up against these big-bugs of industry at their conventions, and conferences, appearing as representative of The Courier which represents their interests? A damned hypocrite, I'd say! If they had brains enough to read between the lines of my stuff, they'd see it."

"Why don't you tell 'em?" asked Mallory lazily.

"I did, once. I told the President of the United Manufacturers' Association what I really thought of their attitude toward labor."

"With what result?"

"He ordered The Courier to fire me."

"You're still there."

"Yes. But he isn't. I went after him on his record."

"All of which doesn't sound much like mud-eating, Pop."

"I've done my b............