It had been a trying day in the _Searchlight_ office. Godfrey Morris,
our assistant feature editor, was ill, and much of his work had
devolved on me. From ten o'clock in the morning I had steadily read
copy and "built heads," realizing as my blue pencil raced over the
sheets before me that my associates would resent the cutting of their
stories and that Colonel Cartwell would freely condemn the heads. It
was a tradition in Park Row that no human being save himself had ever
built a newspaper head which satisfied our editor-in-chief, and his
nightly explosions of rage over those on the proofs that came to his
desk jarred even the firm walls of the _Searchlight_ building.
To-day I sympathized with Colonel Cartwell, for as I bent wearily over
my desk, cutting, rewriting, adding to the pile of edited copy before
me, a scare-head in a newspaper I had received that morning from my
home city swung constantly before my tired eyes. It was plain that the
ambitious Western editor had been taking lessons in head-building from
the _Searchlight_ itself, and was offering us the tribute of humble
imitation; for, in the blackest type he could select, and stretching
across two columns of the _Sentinel's_ first page, were these
startling lines: