"That won't do," declared the city desk incumbent, with conviction. He caught up the telephone, got the paper's City Hall reporter, and was presently engaged in some polite but pointed suggestions to His Honor the Mayor. Shortly after, Police Headquarters called; the Chief himself was on the wire.

"The Ledger is behind Mr. Banneker, Chief," said Mr. Greenough crisply.

"Carrying concealed weapons? If your men in that precinct were fit to be on the force, there would be no need for private citizens to go armed.

You get the point, I see. Good-bye."

"Unless I am a bad guesser we'll have Banneker back here by evening. And there'll be no manhandling in his case," Mallory said to Burt.

Counsel was taken of Mr. Gordon, as soon as that astute managing editor arrived, as to the handling of the difficult situation. The Ledger, always cynically intolerant of any effort to better the city government, as savoring of "goo-gooism," which was its special _bete noire_, could not well make the shooting a basis for a general attack upon police laxity, though it was in this that lay the special news possibility of the event. On the other hand, the thing was far too sensational to be ignored or too much slurred.

Andreas, the assistant managing editor, in charge of the paper's make-up, a true news-hound with an untainted delight in the unusual and striking, no matter what its setting might be, who had been called into the conference, advocated "smearing it all over the front page, with Banneker's first-hand statement for the lead--pictures too."

Him, Mr. Greenough, impassive joss of the city desk, regarded with a chill eye. "One reporter visiting another gets into a muss and shoots up some riverside toughs," he remarked contemptuously. "You can hardly expect our public to get greatly excited over that. Are we going into the business of exploiting our own cubs?"

Thereupon there was sharp discussion to which Mr. Gordon put an end by remarking that the evening papers would doubtless give them a lead; meantime they could get Banneker's version.

First to come in was The Evening New Yorker, the most vapid of all the local prints, catering chiefly to the uptown and shopping element. Its heading half-crossed the page proclaiming "Guest of Yachtsman Shoots Down Thugs." Nowhere in the article did it appear that Banneker had any connection with the newspaper world. He was made to appear as a young Westerner on a visit to the yacht of a millionaire business man, having come on from his ranch in the desert, and presumptively--to add the touch of godhead--a millionaire himself.

"The stinking liars!" said Andreas.

"That settles it," declared Mr. Gordon. "We'll give the facts plainly and without sensationalism; but all the facts."

"Including Mr. Banneker's connection here?" inquired Mr. Greenough.

"Certainly."

The other evening papers, more honest than The Evening New Yorker, admitted, though, as it were, regretfully and in an inconspicuous finale to their accounts that the central figure of the sensation was only a reporter. But the fact of his being guest on a yacht was magnified and glorified.

At five o'clock Banneker arrived, having been bailed out after some difficulty, for the police were frightened and ugly, foreseeing that this swift vengeance upon the notorious gang, meted out by a private hand, would throw a vivid light upon their own inefficiency and complaisance. Happily the District Attorney's office was engaged in one of its periodical feuds with the Police Department over some matter of graft gone astray, and was more inclined to make a cat's-paw than a victim out of Banneker.

Though inwardly strung to a high pitch, for the police officials had kept him sleepless through the night by their habitual inquisition, Banneker held himself well in hand as he went to the City Desk to report gravely that he had been unable to come earlier.

"So we understand, Mr. Banneker," said Mr. Greenough, his placid features for once enlivened. "That was a good job you did. I congratulate you."

"Thank you, Mr. Greenough," returned Banneker. "I had to do it or get done. And, at that, it wasn't much of a trick. They were a yellow lot."

"Very likely: very likely. You've handled a gun before."

"Only in practice."

"Ever shot anybody before?"

"No, sir."

"How does it feel?" inquired the city editor, turning his pale eyes on the other and fussing nervously with his fingers.

"At first you want to go on killing," answered Banneker. "Then, when it's over, there's a big let-down. It doesn't seem as if it were you."

He paused and added boyishly: "The evening papers are making an awful fuss over it."

"What do you expect? It isn't every day that a Wild West Show with real bullets and blood is staged in this effete town."

"Of course I knew there'd be a kick-up about it," admitted Banneker.

"But, some way--well, in the West, if a gang gets shot up, there's quite a bit of talk for a while, and the boys want to buy the drinks for the fellow that does it, but it doesn't spread all over the front pages. I suppose I still have something of the Western view.... How much did you want of this, Mr. Greenough?" he concluded in a business-like tone.

"You are not doing the story, Mr. Banneker. Tommy Burt is."

"I'm not writing it? Not any of it?"

"Certainly not. You're the hero"--there was a hint of elongation of the first syllable which might have a sardonic connotation from those pale and placid lips--"not the historian. Burt will interview you."

"A Patriot reporter has already. I gave him a statement."

Mr. Greenough frowned. "It would have been as well to have waited.

However."

"Oh, Banneker," put in Mallory, "Judge Enderby wants you to call at his office."

"Who's Judge Enderby?"

"Chief Googler of the Goo-Goos; the Law Enforcement Society lot. They call him the ablest honest lawyer in New York. He's an old crab. Hates the newspapers, particularly us."

"Why?"

"He cherishes some theory," said Mr. Greenough in his most toneless voice, "that a newspaper ought to be conducted solely in the interests of people like himself."

"Is there any reason why I should go chasing around to see him?"

"That's as you choose. He doesn't see reporters often. Perhaps it would be as well."

"His outfit are after the police," explained Mallory. "That's what he wants you for. It's part of their political game. Always politics."

"Well, he can wait until to-morrow, I suppose," remarked Banneker indifferently.

Greenough examined him with impenetrable gaze. This was a very cavalier attitude toward Judge Willis Enderby. For Enderby was a man of real power. He might easily have been the most munificently paid corporation attorney in the country but for the various kinds of business which he would not, in his own homely phrase, "poke at with a burnt stick."

Notwithstanding his prejudices, he was confidential legal adviser, in personal and family affairs, to a considerable percentage of the important men and women of New York. He was supposed to be the only man who could handle that bull-elephant of finance, ruler of Wall Street, and, when he chose to give it his contemptuous attention, dictator, through his son and daughters, of the club and social world of New York, old Poultney Masters, in the apoplectic rages into which the slightest thwart to his will plunged him. To Enderby's adroitness the financier (one of whose pet vanities was a profound and wholly baseless faith in himself as a connoisseur of art) owed it that he had not become a laughing-stock through his purchase of a pair of particularly flagrant Murillos, planted for his special behoof by a gang of clever Italian swindlers. Rumor had it that when Enderby had privately summed up his client's case for his client's benefit before his client as referee, in these words: "And, Mr. Masters, if you act again in these matters without consulting me, you must find another lawyer; I cannot afford fools for clients"--they had to call in a physician and resort to the ancient expedient of bleeding, to save the great man's cerebral arteries from bursting.

Toward the public press, Enderby's attitude was the exact reverse of Horace Vanney's. For himself, he unaffectedly disliked and despised publicity; for the interests which he represented, he delegated it to others. He would rarely be interviewed; his attitude toward the newspapers was consistently repellent. Consequently his infrequent utterances were treasured as pearls, and given a prominence far above those of the too eager and over-friendly Mr. Vanney, who, incidentally, was his associate on the directorate of the Law Enforcement Society. The newspapers did not like Willis Enderby any more than he liked them. But they cherished for him an unrequited respect.

That a reporter, a nobody of yesterday whose association with The Ledger constituted his only claim to any status whatever, should profess indifference to a summons from a man of Enderby's position, suggested affectation to Mr. Greenough's suspicions. Young Mr. Banneker's head was already swelling, was it? Very well; in the course of time and his duties, Mr. Greenough would apply suitable remedies.

If Banneker were, indeed, taking a good conceit of himself from the conspicuous position achieved so unexpectedly, the morning papers did nothing to allay it. Most of them slurred over, as lightly as possible, the fact of his journalistic connection; as in the evening editions, the yacht feature was kept to the fore. There were two exceptions. The Ledger itself, in a colorless and straightforward article, frankly identified the hero of the episode, in the introductory sentence, as a member of its city staff, and his host of the yacht as another journalist. But there was one notable omission about which Banneker determined to ask Tommy Burt as soon as he could see him. The Patriot, most sensational of the morning issues, splurged wildly under the caption, "Yacht Guest Cleans Out Gang Which Cowed Police." The Sphere, in an editorial, demanded a sweeping and honest investigation of the conditions which made life unsafe in the greatest of cities. The Sphere was always demanding sweeping and honest investigations, and not infrequently getting them. In Greenough's opinion this undesirable result was likely to be achieved now. To Mr. Gordon he said:

"We ought to shut down all we can on the Banneker follow-up. An investigation with our man as prosecuting witness would put us in the position of trying to reform the police, and would play into the hands of the Enderby crowd."

The managing editor shook a wise and grizzled head. "If The Patriot keeps up its whooping and The Sphere its demanding, the administration will have to do something. After all, Mr. Greenough, things have become pretty unendurable in the Murder Precinct."

"That's true. But the signed statement of Banneker's in The Patriot--it's really an interview faked up as a statement--is a savage attack on the whole administration."

"I understand," remarked Mr. Gordon, "that they were going to beat him up scientifically in the station house when Smith came in and scared them out of it."