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Perhaps that was just a hunch.”Barbee shivered again. He knew that he himself possessed what he called the “nose for news” – an intuitive perception of human motivations and the impending events that would spring from them. It wasn’t a faculty he could analyze or account for, but he knew that it wasn’t unusual. Most successful reporters possessed it, he believed – even though, in an age of skepticism for everything except mechanistic materialism, they wisely denied it.That dim sense had been useful to him – on those summer field trips, before Mendrick turned him out, it had led him to more than one promising prehistoric site, simply because he somehow knew where a band of wild hunters would prefer to camp, or to dig a comrade’s grave.Commonly, however, that uncontrolled faculty had been more curse than blessing. It made him too keenly aware of all that people thought and did around him, kept him troubled with an uneasy alertness. Except when he was drunk. He drank too much, and knew that many other newsmen did. That vague sensitivity, he believed; was half the reason.
