ly. "I just meant--I was ready to do that
for nothing."

"What for?" replied his new friend. "Why shouldn't you be paid for it,
just as well as anyone else? Come in tomorrow, maybe we can dope out
some other story together."

A little more urging satisfied the rest of Stuart's scruples and he
walked out from the office into the streets of Havana tingling with
pleasure to his very toes. This was the first money he had ever earned
and it fired him with enthusiasm to become a writer.

As soon as he had left, the reporter looked over the sheets of
copy-paper, covered with writing in a boyish hand.

"Not so bad," he mused. "The kid may be able to write some day,"
and--dropped the sheets into the waste-paper basket.

Why had he paid for them, then? Dinville knew what he was about.

He reached for a sheet of copy-paper and wrote the following dispatch--

WHALE - OF - BIG - STORY. - INFORMANT - A - KID. - WORTH - SENDING
- KID - NEW - YORK - PAPER'S - EXPENSE - IF - AUTHORIZED. -
DINVILLE.

He filed it in the cable office without delay.

Before midnight he got a reply.

IF - KID - HAS - THE - GOODS - SEND - NEW - YORK - AT - ONCE.

"Here," said Dinville aloud, as he read the cablegram, "is where Little
Willie was a wise guy in buying that kid's story. He'll land in here
tomorrow like a bear going to a honey-tree."

His diagnosis was correct to the letter. Early the next morning Stuart
came bursting in, full of importance. He had spruced up a little, though
the four dollars he had got from Dinville the night before was not
sufficient for new clothes.

"Say," he said, the minute he entered the office, "Mr. Dinville, I've
got a corker!"

"So?" queried the reporter, lighting a cigar and putting his feet on the
desk in comfortable attitude for listening. "Fire away!"

With avid enthusiasm, Stuart plunged into a wild and woolly yarn which
would have been looked upon with suspicion by the editor of a
blood-and-thunder twenty-five-cent series.

The reporter cut him off abruptly.

"Kid," he said dryly, "the newspaper game is on the level. I don't say
that you don't have to give a twist to a story, every once in a while,
so that it'll be interesting, but it's got to be news.

"Get this into your skull if you're ever going to be a newspaper man:
Every story you write has got to have happened, actually happened, to
somebody, somewhere, at so