efficiency. I've
often thought that, when I was handling a good, bloody murder story,
say, it would tone up my style to have a phonograph about ten feet away
grinding out The Last Ravings of John McCullough. Anyway, I am sure it
wouldn't do any harm. A brass band playing a John Philip Sousa march
makes fine accompaniment to write copy to. I've done it before now,
covering parades and conventions, and I know.

But on this particular occasion I was, as I say, new to the job and
maybe a little nervous to boot, and as I sat there, trying to frame a
snappy opening paragraph for the interview I had just brought back with
me from one of the hotels, I became aware of a voice somewhere in the
immediate vicinity, a voice that didn't jibe in with my thoughts. At the
moment I stopped to listen it was saying: "As for me, sir, I have always
contended that the ultimate fate of the cause was due in great measure
to the death of Albert Sidney Johnston at Shiloh on the evening of the
first day's fight. Now then, what would have been the final result if
Albert Sidney Johnston had lived? I ask you, gentlemen, what would have
been the final result if Albert Sidney Johnston had lived?"

Across the room from me I heard Devore give a hollow groan. His desk was
backed right up against the cross partition, and the partition was built
of thin pine boards and was like a sounding board in his ear. Devore was
city editor.

"Oh, thunder!" he said, half under his breath, "I'll be the goat! What
would have been the result if Albert Sidney Johnston had lived?" He
looked at me and gave a wink of serio-comic despair, and then he ran his
blue pencil up through his hair and left a blue streak like a scar on
his scalp. Devore was one of the few city editors I have ever seen who
used that tool which all of them are popularly supposed to handle so
murderously--a blue pencil. And as he had a habit, when he was flustered
or annoyed--and that was most of the time--of scratching his head with
the point end of it, his forehead under the hair roots was usually
streaked with purplish-blue tracings, like a fly-catcher's egg.

The voice, which had a deep and space-filling quality to it, continued
to come through and over the partition that divided off our cubby-hole
of a workroom--called a city room by courtesy--from the space where
certain other members of the staff had their desks. I got up from my
place and stepped over to where the thin wall ended in a doorway,