ly I saw him climbing laboriously up
the stairs to the second floor where the chief had his office. At
quitting time that afternoon I dropped into the place on the corner for
a beer, and I was drinking it, as close to an electric fan as I could
get, when Devore came in and made for where I was standing. I asked him
to have something.

"I'll take the same," he said to the man behind the bar, and then to me
with a kind of explosive snap: "By George, I'm in a good mind to resign
this rotten job!" That didn't startle me. I had been in the business
long enough to know that the average newspaper man is forever
threatening to resign. Most of them--to hear them talk--are always just
on the point of throwing up their jobs and buying a good-paying country
weekly somewhere and taking things easy for the rest of their lives, or
else they're going into magazine work. Only they hardly ever do it. So
Devore's threat didn't jar me much. I'd heard it too often.

"What's the trouble?" I asked. "Heat getting on your nerves?"

"No, it's not the heat," he said peevishly; "it's worse than the heat.
Do you know what's happened? The chief has saddled Old Signal Corps on
me. Yes, sir, I've got to take his old pet, the major, on the city
staff. It seems he's succeeded in losing what little property he
had--the chief told me some rigmarole about sudden financial
reverses--and now he's down and out. So I'm elected. I've got to take
him on as a reporter--a cub reporter sixty-odd years old, mind you, who
hasn't heard of anything worth while since Robert E. Lee surrendered!"

The pathos of the situation--if you could call it that--hit me with a
jolt; but it hadn't hit Devore, that was plain. He saw only the annoying
part of it.

"What's he going to do?" I asked--"assignments, or cover a route like
the district men?"

"Lord knows," said Devore. "Because the old bore knows a lot of big
people in this town and is friendly with all the old-timers in the
state, the chief has a wild delusion that he can pick up a lot of stuff
that an ordinary reporter wouldn't get. Rats!

"Come on, let's take another beer," he said, and then he added: "Well,
I'll just make you two predictions. He'll be a total loss as a
reporter--that's one prediction; and the other is that he'll have a hard
time buying his provender and his toddies over at the Shawnee Club on
the salary he'll draw down from the Evening Press."

Devore was not such a very great city editor, as I k