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118
NEWSREEL MAN
“That’s right,” chorussed the crowd. “Where’s the nearest phone?”
“Try Gebhart’s restaurant on Broad Street, Hopewell,” suggested a trooper.
There was a mad scramble for cars, and soon the Wertsville Road was alive with speeding vehicles. A great pall of dust, made opaquely luminous by the glare of hundreds of headlights, rolled toward the Sourlands like a charge of lethal gas. I wonder w^hat the anxious father atop the hill, who so intently hates publicity, thought as he watched that mad cavalcade. Did he realize that many of those folks were parents like himself and just as anxious to have the baby returned to him, or did he damn them for intruding upon his personal affairs?
Up till that evening Gebhart’s store probably never contained more than ten people at one time, and the rooming house operated in conjunction with it only catered to itinerant motor tourists. Mr. Gebhart was going about his usual duties the evening of March 2nd, and he had just completed a list of supplies that he thought needed replenishing from Trenton. As he started toward the lone phone booth in the store he smiled complacently. A private booth lent tone to the establishment, and the blue insignia, marking a phone within, had drawn many a prospective customer for food or cigarettes. Mr. Gebhart was about to drop a nickel and turn the little side crank that signalled the local operator when he heard a noise that sounded like an approaching whirlwind. Raucous horns, klaxons, two-tone trumpets, screeching brakes, the shouts of excited people, and the clump of manj’^ feet on the porch of his establishment. He looked out. It seemed as if a million wild-eyed madmen were trying to burst into the store. One succeeded, and as he came running towards the booth Mr. Gebhart paled a little. The next second he found himself yanked out of the booth and in the midst of the mob. A hawk-eyed individual ^^’ith coat collar turned up, hat pushed back on his head, was shouting into the transmitter. He jiggled the hook savagely.
“What the hell’s the matter with this phone?” he yelled.
“Lemme at it,” shouted another. “You big-city wise guys don’t know how to operate a side winder.”
“Nerts to you, yokel,” retorted the occupant of the booth. “I was here first, and here I stay.”