Page:Lynch Williams--The stolen story and other newspaper stories.djvu/74

 lift a stick or two of the story from The Day for the later editions. This would be done immediately and without him. So he decided to stay here a minute and say something. He was wrought up.

He slapped the gate-post with his hand. "This is the lowest trick ever perpetrated in this city," he began.

"Yes?" said Stone, who had his hands in his pockets.

"And I'd like to state that the man that would do such a thing"

"Say," put in Haskill, "you needn't heap any abuse on Billy Woods. We aren't in the humor to hear it. He came up here from force of habit, and you're in hard luck; that's all. He forgot that he had been inveigled into joining your dirty sheet, until you reminded him of it just now. Didn't you, Billy?"

Woods made no reply. It would have been a good thing altogether if he could have fallen over in a dramatic faint at this point, or, say, when the presses began. But he did not know how. So he only sat there behind the others, with his glasses sliding down, lis-