"I didn't get around to this business until now, but two other men were
found in Grant Park. Like this. They were taken to private hospitals."
"Good Lord!" the doctor breathed, startled. "This goes deeper than I
thought. There must be something in Grant Park--"
"Something that I intend to look into," Bryan said quietly. "There's a
story here--if I can dig it out."
He thrust the envelope and pencil back into his jacket, together with
the slip of paper he had been given. "I'll be running along, Dave.
Thanks for your tip. It was swell of you to remember me."
The other gestured as he followed Bryan into the hall and toward the
elevators. "Maybe I had an ulterior motive. Ruth and I have been
wondering why you never drop in any more."
"I've been running a rat-race," Bryan said.
"You look it, Terry. You don't look as well as you did when you first
came back from overseas."
"What a big medicine bottle you have, doc!"
"I'm serious, Terry. I've had an idea you weren't happy about things,
and now I'm sure of it. What seems to be the trouble? Your job?"
"The job's all right."
"You won't tell an old friend?"
Bryan lifted his hands. "Hell, Dave, I don't know just what is wrong.
But it might be something like this. I fought a little war of my own,
a personal war, to make the world a better place. Now that I'm back,
though, it's the same old world--only a lot worse. And a reporter
gets to see too much of the worse side."
"One man can't change the world, Terry," the doctor said. "All he can
do it make the best of his small piece of it.... What you need to do
is to get married and raise a family. And while on the subject, what
became of that pretty girl reporter you brought around with you a
couple of times?"
"Joyce? She's still with the paper."
"She seemed like a sensible person. Make a nice wife."
"Yes," Bryan said. He stopped in front of the elevator and held out his
hand. "Thanks again, Dave. I'll drop in some evening, when the rat-race
slows up a little. My love to Ruth."
"Take care of yourself, Terry." The doctor stood watching as the
elevator doors closed on Bryan's figure. A worried frown deepened the
lines in his forehead.
* * * * *
Outside, on the sidewalk before the hospital, Bryan lighted a
cigarette. He stood there for some minutes, a big man in a rumpled
tweed suit, his hat pushed back on thick brown hair that had a coppery
glint in the bright sunshine. He had powerful shoulders, and the hands
that went with them, but his face was fine-carved and sensitive--the
face of an artist, or a dreamer. There was that paradox in him. And
in that paradox was his personal tragedy. For while his strength took
him easily through the deceit and cruelty of life, the stupidity and
ugliness, the memory of each encounter remained with him like a scar.
The scars were beginning to show a bit too plainly. It had taken Dave
to make him realize that.
Dave.... What was it Dave had said? There was an importance in the
words.
"_One man can't change the world, Terry._"
That was it. Bryan considered the remark now, intently.
Was that what he really wanted to do--change the world? He groped among
old ideals and ambitions for the answer.
In the beginning he had wanted to create--to create by writing about
people, about life. But to write about life required knowing it. He had
become a reporter.
What he had learned of life was evilness, greed, suffering, ignorance.
He could not write of that and still create as he had dreamed. But
he could fight it. He could fight it wherever he found it, little by
little. And he had fought. It was all that had kept him going.
A fool's mission, doomed to failure. Dave was right.
Bryan had his answer now. He didn't want to change the world. He wanted
to do something even more impossible--he wanted to make a world of his
own.
He grinned sourly and flipped the remains of the cigarette away.
Hailing a cab, then, he rode to the _Courier_ Building.
* * * * *
The city room was filled with the old familiar clamor, the rattle of
typewriters and teletypes, the shrilling of telephones, the undulant
babble of voices. Bryan waved in answer to greetings as he threaded
his way to his desk. He rolled a sheet of paper into his typewriter,
lighted a cigarette, and rubbed his face. Then he straightened with a
jerk and began hitting the typewriter keys with the first and second
fingers of each hand.
Managing Editor Frank Sanders hurried past with a bulging file
envelope, his vest open and his stiff white hair a usual disorderly
tangle. He whirled as though Bryan's presence had only then registered
on him.
"Terry! Where the hell have you been?" He jerked a thumb. "My office.
Right away."
Bryan finished a paragraph and then followed Sanders into his
glass-enclosed cubicle. He slumped into a chair and waited.
Sanders tried without success to light a clogged pipe. He dropped it
back into the ashtray and said abruptly, "That Holzheimer story, Terry.
You did a nice job clearing the kid, but your copy was pretty rough on
the district attorney. Too rough, Terry."
"I should have thrown a street-car at him," Bryan said. "Trying to
frame a kid and build up a record."
"Circumstantial evidence and re-election, Terry. It happens all the
time--you ought to know. And you ought to know we're politically on the
D.A.'s side of the fence. Stories like the one you wrote about the
Holzheimer case will only hurt the campaign this paper is putting on."
"Sometimes there's too much incompetence to whitewash--even if it comes
from the right side of the fence."
Sanders shook his disorderly thatch. "You ought to know better than
that, Terry. You've been around long enough. This is no time to get a
rush of ideals to the head."
"I've never pulled my punches," Bryan returned quietly.
"I know. But we just can't have any more stories like the one on the
Holzheimer case." Sanders leaned forward at his desk, his eyes suddenly
shrewd. "What's eating on you, Terry?"