"Just this side of their stamping ground. It's a gang of wharf rats.

There have been a number of hold-ups, and last week a dead woman was found under the pier."

Banneker made an unobtrusive addition to his packing. "They'll have to move fast to catch me," he observed.

"Two of us together won't be molested. But if you're alone, be careful.

The police in that precinct are no good. They're either afraid or they stand in with the gang."

On Fifth Avenue the pair got a late-cruising taxicab whose driver, however, declined to take them nearer than one block short of the pier.

"The night air in that place ain't good fer weak constitutions," he explained. "One o' my pals got a headache last week down on the pier from bein' beaned with a sandbag."

No one interfered with the two reporters, however. A whistle from the end of the pier evolved from the watery dimness a dinghy, which, in a hundred yards of rowing, delivered them into a small but perfectly appointed yacht. Banneker, looking about the luxurious cabin, laughed a little.

"That was a bad guess of mine about half expenses," he said good-humoredly. "I'd have to mortgage my future for a year. Do you own this craft?"

"My father does. He's been called back West."

Bells rang, the wheel began to churn, and Banneker, falling asleep in his berth with a vivifying breeze blowing across him, awoke in broad daylight to a view of sparkling little waves which danced across his vision to smack impudently the flanks of the speeding craft.

"We'll be in by noon," was Smith's greeting as they met on the companionway for a swim.

"What do you do it for?" asked Banneker, seated at the breakfast table, with an appetite such as he had not known for weeks.

"Do what?"

"Two men's work at twenty-five per for The Ledger?"

"Training."

"Are you going to stick to the business?"

"The family," explained Smith, "own a newspaper in Toledo. It fell to them by accident. Our real business is manufacturing farm machinery, and none of us has ever tried or thought of manufacturing newspapers. So they wished on me the job of learning how."

"Do you like it?"

"Not particularly. But I'm going through with it."

Banneker felt a new and surprised respect for his host. He could forecast the kind of small city newspaper that Smith would make; careful, conscientious, regular in politics, loyal to what it deemed the best interests of the community, single-minded in its devotion to the Smith family and its properties; colorless, characterless, and without vision or leadership in all that a newspaper should, according to Banneker's opinion, stand for. So he talked with the fervor of an enthusiast, a missionary, a devotee, who saw in that daily chronicle of the news an agency to stir men's minds and spur their thoughts, if need be, to action; at the same time the mechanism and instrument of power, of achievement, of success. Fentriss Smith listened and was troubled in spirit by these unknown fires. He had supposed respectability to be the final aim and end of a sound newspaper tradition.

The apparent intimacy which had sprung up between twenty-five-dollar Smith and the reserved, almost hermit-like Banneker was the subject of curious and amused commentary in The Ledger office. Mallory hazarded a humorous guess that Banneker was tutoring Smith in the finer arts of journalism, which was not so far amiss as its proponent might have supposed.

The Great Heat broke several evenings later in a drench of rain and wind. This, being in itself important news, kept Banneker late at his writing, and he had told his host not to wait, that he would join him on the yacht sometime about midnight. So Smith had gone on alone.

The next morning Tommy Burt, lounging into the office from an early assignment, approached the City Desk with a twinkle far back in his lively eyes.

"Hear anything of a shoot-fest up in the Bad Lands last night?" he asked.

"Not yet," replied Mr. Greenough. "They're getting to be everyday occurrences up there. Is it on the police slips, Mr. Mallory?"

"No. Nothing in that line," answered the assistant, looking over his assortment.

"Police are probably suppressing it," opined Burt.

"Have you got the story?" queried Mr. Greenough.

"In outline. It isn't really my story."

"Whose is it, then?"

"That's part of it." Tommy Burt leaned against Mallory's desk and appeared to be revolving some delectable thought in his mind.

"Tommy," said Mallory, "they didn't open that committee meeting you've been attending with a corkscrew, did they?"

"I'm intoxicated with the chaste beauties of my story, which isn't mine," returned the dreamily smiling Mr. Burt. "Here it is, boiled down.

Guest on an anchored yacht returning late, sober, through the mist.

Wharf-gang shooting craps in a pier-shed. They size him up and go to it; six of 'em. Knives and one gun: maybe more. The old game: one asks for the time. Another sneaks up behind and gives the victim the elbow-garrote. The rest rush him. Well, they got as far as the garrote.

Everything lovely and easy. Then Mr. Victim introduces a few specialties. Picks a gun from somewhere around his shirt-front, shoots the garroter over his shoulder; kills the man in front, who is at him with a stiletto, ducks a couple of shots from the gang, and lays out two more of 'em. The rest take to the briny. Tally: two dead, one dying, one wounded, Mr. Guest walks to the shore end, meets two patrolmen, and turns in his gun. 'I've done a job for you,' says he. So they pinch him.

He's in the police station, _incomunicado_."

Throughout the narrative, Mr. Greenough had thrown in little, purring interjections of "Good! Good!"--"Yes."--"Ah! good!" At the conclusion Mallory exclaimed!

"Moses! That is a story! You say it isn't yours? Why not?"

"Because it's Banneker's."

"Why?"

"He's the guest with the gun."

Mallory jumped in his chair. "Banneker!" he exclaimed. "Oh, hell!" he added disconsolately.

"Takes the shine out of the story, doesn't it?" observed Burt with a malicious smile.

One of the anomalous superstitions of newspaperdom is that nothing which happens to a reporter in the line of his work is or can be "big news."

The mere fact that he is a reporter is enough to blight the story.

"What was Banneker doing down there?" queried Mr. Greenough.

"Visiting on a yacht."

"Is that so?" There was a ray of hope in the other's face. The glamour of yachting association might be made to cast a radiance about the event, in which the damnatory fact that the principal figure was a mere reporter could be thrown into low relief. Such is the view which journalistic snobbery takes of the general public's snobbery. "Whose yacht?"

Again the spiteful little smile appealed on Burt's lips as he dashed the rising hope. "Fentriss Smith's."

And again the expletive of disillusion burst from between Mallory's teeth as he saw the front-page double-column spread, a type-specialty of the usually conservative Ledger upon which it prided itself, dwindle to a carefully handled inside-page three-quarter of a column.

"You say that Mr. Banneker is in the police station?" asked the city editor.

"Or at headquarters. They're probably working the third degree on him."