"Something of that sort."

"Are you awfully bored and wishing I'd go away and let you alone?" she said, on a note that pleaded for forbearance. "Because if you are, don't make such heroic efforts to conceal it."

At this an almost imperceptible twist at the corners of his lips manifested itself to the watchful eye and cheered the enterprising soul of Miss Forbes. "No," he said equably, "I'm interested to discover how far you'll go."

The snub left Miss Forbes unembarrassed.

"Oh, as far as you'll let me," she answered. "Did you ride in from your ranch and drag Io out of the tangled wreckage at the end of your lasso?"

"My ranch? I wasn't on a ranch."

"Please, sir," she smiled up at him like a beseeching angel, "what did you do that kept us all talking and speculating about you for a whole week, though we didn't know your name?"

"I sat right on my job as station-agent at Manzanita and made up lists of the killed and injured," answered Banneker dryly.

"Station-agent!" The girl was taken aback, for this was not at all in consonance with the Io myth as it had drifted back, from sources never determined, to New York. "Were you the station-agent?"

"I was."

She bestowed a glance at once appraising and flattering, less upon himself than upon his apparel. "And what are you now? President of the road?"

"A reporter on The Ledger."

"Really!" This seemed to astonish her even more than the previous information. "What are you reporting here?"

"I'm off duty to-night."

"I see. Could you get off duty some afternoon and come to tea, if I'll promise to have Io there to meet you?"

"Your party seems to be making signals of distress, Miss Forbes."

"That's the normal attitude of my friends and family toward me. You'll come, won't you, Mr. Banneker?"

"Thank you: but reporting keeps one rather too busy for amusement."

"You won't come," she murmured, aggrieved. "Then it _is_ true about you and Io."

This time she achieved a result. Banneker flushed angrily, though he said, coolly enough: "I think perhaps you would make an enterprising reporter, yourself, Miss Forbes."

"I'm sure I should. Well, I'll apologize. And if you won't come for Io--she's still abroad, by the way and won't be back for a month--perhaps you'll come for me. Just to show that you forgive my impertinences. Everybody does. I'm going to tell Bertie Cressey he must bring you.... All right, Bertie! I wish you wouldn't follow me up like--like a paper-chase. Good-night, Mr. Banneker."

To her indignant escort she declared that it couldn't have hurt them to wait a jiffy; that she had had a most amusing conversation; that Mr.

Banneker was as charming as he was good to look at; and that (in answer to sundry questions) she had found out little or nothing, though she hoped for better results in future.

"But he's Io's passion-in-the-desert right enough," said the irreverent Miss Forbes.

Banneker sat long over his cooling coffee. Through haunted nights he had fought maddening memories of Io's shadowed eyes, of the exhalant, irresistible femininity of her, of the pulses of her heart against his on that wild and wonderful night in the flood; and he had won to an armed peace, in which the outposts of his spirit were ever on guard against the recurrent thoughts of her.

Now, at the bitter music of her name on the lips of a gossiping and frivolous girl, the barriers had given away. In eagerness and self-contempt he surrendered to the vision. Go to an afternoon tea to see and speak with her again? He would, in that awakened mood, have walked across the continent, only to be in her presence, to feel himself once more within the radius of that inexorable charm.

CHAPTER VII

"Katie's" sits, sedate and serviceable, on a narrow side street so near to Park Row that the big table in the rear rattles its dishes when the presses begin their seismic rumblings, in the daily effort to shake the world. Here gather the pick and choice of New York journalism, while still on duty, to eat and drink and discuss the inner news of things which is so often much more significant than the published version; haply to win or lose a few swiftly earned dollars at pass-three hearts.

It is the unofficial press club of Newspaper Row.

Said McHale of The Sphere, who, having been stuck with the queen of spades--that most unlucky thirteener--twice in succession, was retiring on his losses, to Mallory of The Ledger who had just come in:

"I hear you've got a sucking genius at your shop."

"If you mean Banneker, he's weaned," replied the assistant city editor of The Ledger. "He goes on space next week."

"Does he, though! Quick work, eh?"

"A record for the office. He's been on the staff less than a year."

"Is he really such a wonder?" asked Glidden of The Monitor.

Three or four Ledger men answered at once, citing various stories which had stirred the interest of Park Row.

"Oh, you Ledger fellows are always giving the college yell for each other," said McHale, impatiently voicing the local jealousy of The Ledger's recognized _esprit de corps_. "I've seen bigger rockets than him come down in the ash-heap."

"He won't," prophesied Tommy Burt, The Ledger's humorous specialist.

"He'll go up and stay up. High! He's got the stuff."

"They say," observed Fowler, the star man of The Patriot, "he covers his assignment in taxicabs."

"He gets the news," murmured Mallory, summing up in that phrase all the encomiums which go to the perfect praise of the natural-born reporter.

"And he writes it," put in Van Cleve of The Courier. "Lord, how that boy can write! Why, a Banneker two-sticks stands out as if it were printed in black-face."

"I've never seen him around," remarked Glidden. "What does he do with himself besides work?"

"Nothing, I imagine," answered Mallory. "One of the cubs reports finding him at the Public Library, before ten o'clock in the morning, surrounded by books on journalism. He's a serious young owl."

"It doesn't get into his copy, then," asserted "Parson" Gale, political expert for The Ledger.

"Nor into his appearance. He certainly dresses like a flower of the field. Even the wrinkles in his clothes have the touch of high-priced Fifth Avenue."

"Must be rich," surmised Fowler. "Taxis for assignments and Fifth-Avenue raiment sound like real money."

"Nobody knows where he got it, then," said Tommy Burt. "Used to be a freight brakeman or something out in the wild-and-woolly. When he arrived, he was dressed very proud and stiff like a Baptist elder going to make a social call, all but the made-up bow tie and the oil on the hair. Some change and sudden!"

"Got a touch of the swelled head, though, hasn't he?" asked Van Cleve.

"I hear he's beginning to pick his assignments already. Refuses to take society stuff and that sort of thing."