Page:Lynch Williams--The stolen story and other newspaper stories.djvu/299

 It was the sort of story Billy loved. A large mining and land company, well known and believed in by nearly everybody, had suddenly and quite unexpectedly come to grief. So much of the story, and very little else, by way of news, had been published that morning all over the globe. Why the company had met with disaster had not been published, because that could not be found out, as yet, not even by the cleverest reporters in the most enterprising newspaper centre of both hemispheres.

It was, indeed, just the sort of story the old Billy Woods could have handled. And as he walked energetically across City Hall Park, past the indigent and intoxicated on the benches, he was resolving again with all that was in him to be the old Billy Woods. As he ran up the L steps and boarded a train he swore never to drink again as long as he lived. This was where he usually swore never to drink again.

Nearly all the newspaper world—that is, men who represented the newspapers of the whole world—were buzzing around the office of the stranded firm. It was down in