Byron collar--and his sleeve ends.

The major's harmlessly pompous manner was all gone from him that night.
Of late his self-assurance had seemed to be fraying and frazzling away,
along with those old-timey, full-bosomed shirts of which he had in times
gone by been so tremendously proud. It was as though the passing of the
one marked the passing of the other--symbolic as you might say.
Formerly, too, the major had also excelled mightily in miscellaneous
conversation, dominating it by sheer weight of tediousness. Now he sat
silent while these youngsters with their unthatched lips--born, most of
them, after he reached middle age--babbled the jargon of their trade. He
considered a little ravelly strip along one of his cuffs solicitously.

Ike Webb was saying this--that the biggest thing in the whole created
world was a big scoop--an exclusive, world-beating, bottled-up scoop of
a scoop. Nothing that could possibly come into a reporter's life was
one-half so big and so glorious and satisfying. He warmed to his theme:

"Gee! fellows, but wouldn't it be great to get a scoop on a thing like
this Bullard murder! Just suppose now that one of us, all by himself,
found the person who did the shooting and got a full confession from
him, whoever he was; and got the gun that it was done with--got the
whole thing--and then turned it loose all over the front page before
that big stiff of a Chief Gotlieb down at Central Station knew a thing
about it. Beating the police to it would be the best part of that job.
That's the way they do things in New York. In New York it's the
newspapers that do the real work on big murder mysteries, and the police
take their tips from them. Why, some of the best detectives in New York
are reporters. Look what they did in that Guldensuppe case! Look at what
they've done in half a dozen other big cases! Down here we just follow
along, like sheep, behind a bunch of fat-necked cops, taking their
leavings. Up there a paper turns a man loose, with an unlimited expense
account and all the time he needs, and tells him to go to it. That's the
right way too!"

By that the others knew Ike Webb was thinking of what Vogel had told
him. Vogel was a gifted but admittedly erratic genius from the
metropolis who had come upon us as angels sometimes do--unawares--two
weeks before, with cinders in his ears and the grime of a dusty
right-of-way upon his collar. He had worked for the sheet two weeks and
then, on a Saturday n