The door that opened into the tape-room was swinging constantly now, for it wanted twenty minutes to eleven. Five tickers chattered incessantly, and there was a constant procession of agency boys and telegraph messengers passing in and out the vestibule of the silent building. And the pneumatic tubes that ran from the front hall to the subs' room hissed and exploded periodically, and little leathern carriers rattled into the wire basket at the chief sub's elbow.
A timber fire at Rotherhithe; the sudden rise in Consols; the Sultan of Turkey grants an amnesty to political offenders; a man kills his wife at Wolverhampton; a woman cyclist run down by a motor-car; the Bishop of Elford denounces Non-conformists----
News for to-morrow's breakfast table! intellectual stimulant for the weary people who are even now kicking off their shoes with a sleepy yawn and wondering whether there will be anything in the paper to-morrow.
A boy came flying through the swing door of the tape-room, carrying in his hand a slip of paper.
That restless man looked at it, then looked at the clock.
"Take it to Mr. Greene," he said shortly, and reached for the speaking-tube that connected him with the printer.
"There will be a three-column splash on page five," he said in a matter-of-fact voice.
"What's up?" His startled assistant was on his feet.
"A man found murdered in T. B. Smith's chambers," he said.
The inquest was over, the stuffy little court discharged its morbid public, jurymen gathered in little knots on the pavement permitted themselves to theorise, feeling, perhaps, that the official verdict of "murder against some person or persons unknown" needed amplification.
"My own opinion is," said the stout foreman, "that nobody could have done it, except somebody who could have got into his chambers unknown."
"That's my opinion, too," said another jury-man.
"I should have liked to add a rider," the foreman went on, "something like this: 'We call the coroner's attention to the number of undiscovered murders nowadays, and severely censure the police,' but he wouldn't have it."
"They 'ang together," said a gloomy little man; "p'lice and coroners and doctors, they 'ang together, there's corruption somewhere. I've always said it."