Page:Lynch Williams--The stolen story and other newspaper stories.djvu/94

 work in very much the same matter-of-fact way as reporters and the rest of the town.

Indeed, if he could only shed some of his sensibilities when assignments involved talking to people about things they did not want to talk about, he thought he could be very happy in this wild, free, unconventional life, working when the rest of the town were asleep and eating wherever his work happened to bring him. But, ashamed of it as he was, his pulse beat faster every time he was called up to the desk. "Now what are they going to make me do?" he would ask himself. Of course, he never told anybody, but even when it was only to run down to Wall Street and try to find out from some big gun if that rumor about the Union Pacific was true, he dreaded the task. He knew he would be kept waiting in a long line of people, and he knew he would get angry if he found that he was looked down upon for being a reporter by cocky clerks of Wall Street, most of whom he considered unrefined and so pitifully ignorant—for what did they know of Aryan Roots or The Congestion of Labor! And when his turn came he would