I had no consolation³ to offer him. After a time he resumed: “What they do is to get strangers like us, or any of these down-and-out newspaper men always walking up and down Park Row looking for a job, and get us to work on space because it sounds bigger to a greenhorn. Sure they have space-men here who amount to something, fellows who get big money, but they’re not like us. They make as much as seventy-five and a hundred dollars a week. But they’re rewrite men, old reporters who have too big a pull and who are too sure of themselves to stand for the low salaries they pay here. But they’re at the top. We little fellows are told that stuff about space, but all we get is leg-work. If you or I should get hold of a good story don’t you ever think they’d let us write it. I know that much. They’d take it away and give it to one of these rewrite fellows. There’s one now,” and he pointed to a large comfortable man in a light brown overcoat and brown hat who was but now ambling⁴ in. “He rewrote one of my stories just the other day. If they wanted you for regular work they’d make you take a regular salary for fear you’d get too much of space. They just keep us little fellows as extras to follow up such things as they wouldn’t waste a good man on. And they’re always firing a crowd of men every three or four months to keep up the zip of the staff, to keep ’em worried and working hard. I hate the damned business. I told myself in Pittsburgh that I never would get back in it again, but here I am!”

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