"Cheest!" hissed the thick bouncer in tones of dismay, and stopped short.

Turning, Banneker recognized him as one of the policemen whom his evidence had retired from the force in the wharf-gang investigation.

"Oh! Banneker," muttered the editor. His right hand moved slowly, stealthily, toward a lower drawer.

"Cut it, Major!" implored Con in acute anguish. "Canche' see he's gotche' covered through his pocket!"

The stealthy hand returned to the sight of all men and fussed among some papers on the desk-top. Major Bussey said peevishly:

"What do you want with me?"

"Kill that paragraph."

"What par--"

"Don't fence with me," struck in Banneker sharply. "You know what one."

Major Bussey swept his gaze around the room for help or inspiration. The sight of the burly ex-policeman, stricken and shifting his weight from one foot to the other, disconcerted him sadly; but he plucked up courage to say:

"The facts are well authent--"

Again Banneker cut him short. "Facts! There isn't the semblance of a fact in the whole thing. Hints, slurs, innuendoes."

"Libel does not exist when--" feebly began the editor, and stopped because Banneker was laughing at him.

"Suppose you read that," said the visitor, contemptuously tossing the typed script of his new-wrought editorial on the desk. "_That's_ libellous, if you choose. But I don't think you would sue."

Major Bussey read the caption, a typical Banneker eye-catcher, "The Rattlesnake Dies Out; But the Pen-Viper is Still With Us." "I don't care to indulge myself with your literary efforts at present, Mr. Banneker,"

he said languidly. "Is this the answer to our paragraph?"

"Only the beginning. I propose to drive you out of town and suppress 'The Searchlight.'"

"A fair challenge. I'll accept it."

"I was prepared to have you take that attitude."

"Really, Mr. Banneker; you could hardly expect to come here and blackmail me by threats--"

"Now for my alternative," proceeded the visitor calmly. "You are proposing to publish a slur on the reputation of an innocent woman who--"

"Innocent!" murmured the Major with malign relish.

"Look out, Major!" implored Con, the body-guard. "He's a killer, he is."

"I don't know that I'm particularly afraid of you, after all," declared the exponent of The Searchlight, and Banneker felt a twinge of dismay lest he might have derived, somewhence, an access of courage. "A Wild West shooting is one thing, and cold-blooded, premeditated murder is another. You'd go to the chair."

"Cheerfully," assented Banneker.

Bussey, lifting the typed sheets before him, began to read. Presently his face flushed.

"Why, if you print this sort of thing, you'd have my office mobbed," he cried indignantly.

"It's possible."

"It's outrageous! And this--if this isn't an incitement to lynching--You wouldn't dare publish this!"

"Try me."

Major Bussey's wizened and philanthropic face took on the cast of careful thought. At length he spoke with the manner of an elder bestowing wisdom upon youth.

"A controversy such as this would do nobody any good. I have always been opposed to journalistic backbitings. Therefore we will let this matter lie. I will kill the paragraph. Not that I'm afraid of your threats; nor of your pen, for that matter. But in the best interests of our common profession--"

"Good-day," said Banneker, and walked out, leaving the Major stranded upon the ebb tide of his platitudes.

Banneker retailed the episode to Edmonds, for his opinion.

"He's afraid of your gun, a little," pronounced the expert; "and more of your pen. I think he'll keep faith in this."

"As long as I hold over him the threat of The Patriot."

"Yes."

"And no longer?"

"No longer. It's a vengeful kind of vermin, Ban."

"Pop, am I a common, ordinary blackmailer? Or am I not?"

The other shook his head, grayed by a quarter-century of struggles and problems. "It's a strange game, the newspaper game," he opined.

CHAPTER X

All had worked out, in the matter of The Searchlight, quite as much to Mr. Ely Ives's satisfaction as to that of Banneker. From his boasted and actual underground wire into that culture-bed of spiced sewage (at the farther end of which was the facile brunette whom the visiting editor had so harshly treated), he had learned the main details of the interview and reported them to Mr. Marrineal.

"Will Banneker now be good?" rhetorically queried Ives, pursing up his small face into an expression of judicious appreciation. "He _will_ be good!"

Marrineal gave the subject his habitual calm and impersonal consideration. "He hasn't been lately," he observed. "Several of his editorials have had quite the air of challenge."

"That was before he turned blackmailer. Blackmail," philosophized the astute Ives, "is a gun that you've got to keep pointed all the time."

"I see. So long as he has Bussey covered by the muzzle of The Patriot, The Searchlight behaves itself."

"It does. But if ever he laid down his gun, Bussey would make hash of him and his lady-love."