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“Why did you do this?” he exclaimed. “You shouldn’t have taken this, at all. It may get the paper in trouble. They may have had witnesses to this—but maybe not. Perhaps this fellow is just trying to protect himself. Anyway, we’re going to take this thing back to him and don’t take anything more, do you hear, money or anything. You can’t do that sort of thing. If I didn’t think you were honest I’d fire you right now.”

He took me into the office of the editor-in-chief, who looked at me with still, gray-blue eyes and listened to my story. He dismissed me and talked with McEnnis for a while. When the latter came out he exclaimed triumphantly: “He sees that you’re honest, all right, and he’s tickled to death. Now we’ll take this pin back, and then you’ll write out the whole story just as it happened.”

On the way we went to a magistrate to swear out a charge of attempted bribery against this man, and later in the same day I went with the detective to serve the warrant. To myself I seemed to be swimming in a delicious sea of life. “What a fine thing life is!” I thought. “Here I am getting along famously because I can write. Soon I will get more money, and maybe some day people will begin to hear of me. I will get a fine reputation in the newspaper world.”