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track of current news...The same, the same, with every turn of the rollers the same...two hundred thousand times the same.

Levers click and motors hum and the building quivers and energy leaks out through the concrete floors and climbs the iron beams that vein the trembling shell to the sweating dens of the slaves of news, alert to the roaring call of the type-crusted monster that strains to reach another day. 

Pens drip their sweat in black ink and pencil points wear off, chaff in the wind of speed...The press rolls on...rolls on for one purpose, the birth of news. For in the dark hours news is born, another inky offspring to strut a day. 

Reserve strength wells out of scattered energy and the staff shouts, scurries, telephones, telegraphs, cables - and scribbling haste pours out of palsied hands...Retractions take the place of the baited libel, and the press with a cannibal's gusto eats its own words...Scissors snap and paste pots shuffle over the rewrite desk. The fetid smell of warm ink is high and a steaming mist swings in the thrashing levers, plunging, jerking, sopping up ink. The triple presses are running neck and neck, on a course that leads to dawn. 

News, news...while the black juice flows...News, news, or the ink rollers clog...Listen, you temple-veined slaves...you sweat-soaked scavengers of timely topic...open the window on the draught of current events...catch it...intercept it...ambush it...lie, steal, bribe...but bring in news.

The cry of the press rises higher and higher...Appeasement cataracts in myriad events...Like a crushed fly an honored name is smeared across the type-bed and like a disfiguring birthmark shrieks across the morning issue...Two trains take the same switch...hundreds maimed...a raging inferno envelops the imprisoned passengers...A Japanese spy caught in League Island Navy Yard...Coast defense gun tested...A scientist reveals the wonders of a Roentgen ray...Heavy rains threaten dam...Liner founders off Asbury Park...Coast guard unable to get life line to ship...Jury find Holmes guilty of triple murder...his victims found buried in quicklime...Eighteen men injured in trolley strike...Atlantic City pier burns...Penn's eleven down Lafayette, thirteen to seven...Soaring rise in Bethlehem steel...Buffalo Bill's wild west show at Gentleman's Driving Park...Assembly ball at the Academy of Music. 

News, News, last minute news, while the deadline tightens tripping up sanity...confusing, tangling...demanding super action and strangely getting it...Late news...and tomorrow's blasting surprise as the press slows down to take it on...An avalanche of tragedy...United States battleship Maine blown up in Havana harbor...This is NEWS...this is WAR...Three letters, black like death cover the front page and the press rolls on. 

March, the City Editor, poised like Diana, stood in the Art department doorway and threw his javelin finger into the room..."Who's loafing?" he yelled. Then his spear-like bony fingers spread out and covered every corner of the room. "Got to have somebody, fast...strike breakers riot...burning freight cars...hell to pay out in the railroad yards...Hi...you, Luks, get goin'."

Luks, infirm and slave-sore, shuffled over to his hat and coat. "What yard, Massa Legree?"

"Pennsy...on Market Street..." March bawled. "Damn ye, shake yer bones...Uncle Tom."

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Luks turned in the doorway. "Massa Legree...ye mout own dis ol body but ma soul belongs to Gawd." And giving an imitation of a three-instrument German band he blew a final toot on a piccolo and leaped down the stairs.

"Where's Glackens?" March called as he struck his head at some spot where memory hung...It stayed suspended while he scraped at a congealed strip of blood on his chin and laid an impression of his open hand in recently applied face powder across his moist forehead. "Where's Glackens?" Patience was fast leaking out through the red hole he had made. He widened his collar for air...reeled and gasped.

Crane, the Art department chief, scratched his pen against his daily cartoon...sure, methodical and monotonous..."Say, March...how many tentacles does an octopus have?"

"Insinuating?" March jabbed his own chest with an open thumb, then smiled. "Why?"

"March...I'm a stickler for accuracy...and this octopus of municipal graft I'm drawing has got to strangle twenty different public service departments...and, by the way, Glackens is up at the launching of the Columbia at Cramp's shipyard."

"Sloan, then...what's he doing?" March asked.

"At the morgue wasting his time making a portrait of that suicide Japanese spy they caught in League Island Navy Yard...You would have it authentic...and, by God,-- no Japanese is that.

"What about Shinn, there, is he working for the Press or a New York magazine?" March was showing panic. Crane without looking up from his garroting octopus spoke with authority. "Let Shinn alone...he's got plenty...and then some."

March leaned heavily over Shinn's shoulder and looked down on a half-page drawing of a litter of twisted beams and pulverized brick, billowing smoke and toppling chimneys, and a stretch of buildings illuminated in a ghastly flare. "What's that, Shinn?" March asked.

Shinn did not stop drawing but pushed over another chimney. "Delicatessen store up Seventh Street and a jewelry store blown across the street by a very inconsiderate suicide who lit a match in his gas-soaked kitchen for a last drag at a cigarette."

"Drop it...I want somebody to go to..." His appeal was general but he gripped Shinn's shoulder..."Old man Wilson, the librarian on Spruce Street was found murdered...blood stains on a chess board and an empty hypodermic needle on the floor...work of a human gorilla...Come on, Shinn."

"Who's going to finish this?" Shinn pulled over a half-finished drawing of a scene of horror: Holmes, arch-criminal, hurling with his taloned fingers sections of his third wife in a blazing furnace.

Pete, the photo-engraver in an overpowering wave of chemicals appeared in the doorway, glowering, devil face smudged in a sulphurous pall. "Hi Davis...How's it comin'?" Over Davis' shoulder Pete's anger burst..."Will you ever learn to make profiles when we're in a hurry?...One eye...one ear...and bald men...save time, too."

Davis' objecting elbow held Pete back while his pen darted for the neck of the ink bottle. "Time's up, Davis...Give it up or do I take it?"...Pete hissed. "Put that wet pen in Shinn's other hand...he'll need then both...and he's next." Breathless, he stood over Shinn, fanning the drawing that he had taken from Davis...Pete was a greedy, avaricious cog in the machinery of speed. "Come on, Shinn...I'm short-handed tonight."

"So am I." Shinn growled..."Where's Lou?"

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