Page:Lynch Williams--The stolen story and other newspaper stories.djvu/310

 tion. Besides, this was too good a story to risk over the telephone. There was no one in the office, he thought, who could handle that story in the masterful way he could. All he had to do was to pull himself together now, for this last final spurt, and then he'd be the winner, and all the Row would be talking about him once more, and perhaps The Day … But the trembling old reporter couldn't pull himself together, somehow. He had used up all he had in him, as it was. He called upon his will. But there wasn't very much of that any longer.

"I have demonstrated it for three solid months," he whispered to himself, pushing open a bamboo door, "and now is a time when I need it, if there ever was. It's not the use but the abuse—" The little yielding door shut silently behind him.

"What! You again? I haven't seen you for a long time," said the brisk young hospital surgeon that night as he jumped off his seat in the rear of the ambulance. "Tumble in—that's all right—you'll have