Page:Lynch Williams--The stolen story and other newspaper stories.djvu/46

 ing. "Must be writing letters to the whole staff."

Haskill went down the room and took a story off the telephone from the man who had been sent up to Poughkeepsie to find out about a murder and could not get down before the paper went to press. This required ten minutes and Woods kept on writing furiously. Thus far no one else had noticed him except the office-boys, who wondered.

On the way from the telephone closet Haskill walked around by Woods's desk. Quite from force of editorial habit he glanced over the writer's shoulder, and then he stopped short. He leaned over, ran his eye rapidly down the rest of the page, then turned and fairly ran up the room with a scared look on his face. He grabbed Stone by the shoulder and whispered a few quick, excited words in his ear.

The editor instantly straightened up in his chair.

"What's that? Are you sure? The aldermen!" Then, at the rate of four hundred words to the minute, "Why, that