Page:Lynch Williams--The stolen story and other newspaper stories.djvu/280

 snarling vindictiveness, meanwhile keeping on reading it till they died.

Billy never said a disparaging word about it, and if anyone else tried to in his presence, he would stand up like a son for the family that has banished him. He was almost childish about it. "No wonder," some of the men said, "The Day indulged him more than any paper ever did anyone else."

So now the ex-star of The Day was doing specials. "I ought to be able to get along well as a free lance," he said. His friends thought so, too. But he did not get along very well.

Free lancing is precarious for the most industrious. Billy was not lazy, but he had for so long been writing what he was told to write, in the way he was told to write it, that he did not know how to work now without a boss over him. He had subordinated his own personality to that of the paper's for so long that now his own was afraid to speak.

"How are you getting along, Billy?"

"Oh, first-rate. It's great to be inde-