Marrineal, whose face had become quite expressionless, gave a little start. "Who?" he said.

"Judge Enderby of the Law Enforcement Society."

"Oh! Yes. Of course. Or any one else."

"Or any one else," agreed Banneker, catching a quick, informed glance from Edmonds.

"Frankly, your scheme seems a little fantastic to me," pronounced the owner of The Patriot. "But that may be only because it's new. It might be worth trying out." He reverted again to his expressionless reverie, out of which exhaled the observation: "I wonder what the present editorial staff could do with that."

"Am I to infer that you intend to help yourself to my idea?" inquired Banneker.

Mr. Marrineal aroused himself hastily from his editorial dream. Though by no means a fearful person, he was uncomfortably sensible of a menace, imminent and formidable. It was not in Banneker's placid face, nor in the unaltered tone wherein the pertinent query was couched.

Nevertheless, the object of that query became aware that young Banneker was not a person to be trifled with. He now went on, equably to say:

"Because, if you do, it might be as well to give me the chance of developing it."

Possibly the "Of course," with which Marrineal responded to this reasonable suggestion, was just a little bit over-prompt.

"Give me ten days. No: two weeks, and I'll be ready to show my wares.

Where can I find you?"

Marrineal gave a telephone address. "It isn't in the book," he said. "It will always get me between 9 A.M. and noon."

They talked of matters journalistic, Marrineal lapsing tactfully into the role of attentive listener again, until there appeared in the lower room a dark-faced man of thirty-odd, spruce and alert, who, upon sighting them, came confidently forward. Marrineal ordered him a drink and presented him to the two journalists as Mr. Ely Ives. As Mr. Ives, it appeared, was in the secret of Marrineal's journalistic connection, the talk was resumed, becoming more general. Presently Marrineal consulted his watch.

"You're not going up to the After-Theater Club to-night?" he asked Banneker, and, on receiving a negative reply, made his adieus and went out with Ives to his waiting car.

Banneker and Edmonds looked at each other. "Don't both speak at once,"

chuckled Banneker. "What do _you_?"

"Think of him? He's a smooth article. Very smooth. But I've seen 'em before that were straight as well as smooth."

"Bland," said Banneker. "Bland with a surpassing blandness. A blandness amounting to blandeur, as grandness in the highest degree becomes grandeur. I like that word," Banneker chucklingly approved himself. "But I wouldn't use it in an editorial, one of those editorials that our genial friend was going to appropriate so coolly. A touch of the pirate in him, I think. I like him."

"Yes; you have to. He makes himself likable. What do you figure Mr. Ely Ives to be?"

"Henchman."

"Do you know him?"

"I've seen him uptown, once or twice. He has some reputation as an amateur juggler."

"I know him, too. But he doesn't remember me or he wouldn't have been so pleasant," said the veteran, committing two errors in one sentence, for Ely Ives had remembered him perfectly, and in any case would never have exhibited any unnecessary rancor in his carefully trained manner. "Wrote a story about him once. He's quite a betting man; some say a sure-thing bettor. Several years ago Bob Wessington was giving one of his famous booze parties on board his yacht 'The Water-Wain,' and this chap was in on it somehow. When everybody was tanked up, they got to doing stunts and he bet a thousand with Wessington he could swarm up the backstay to the masthead. Two others wished in for a thousand apiece, and he cleaned up the lot. It cut his hands up pretty bad, but that was cheap at three thousand. Afterwards it turned out that he'd been practicing that very climb in heavy gloves, down in South Brooklyn. So I wrote the story. He came back with a threat of a libel suit. Fool bluff, for it wasn't libelous. But I looked up his record a little and found he was an ex-medical student, from Chicago, where he'd been on The Chronicle for a while. He quit that to become a press-agent for a group of oil-gamblers, and must have done some good selling himself, for he had money when he landed here. To the best of my knowledge he is now a sort of lookout for the Combination Traction people, with some connection with the City Illuminating Company on the side. It's a secret sort of connection."

Banneker made the world-wide symbolistic finger-shuffle of money-handling. "Legislative?" he inquired.

"Possibly. But it's more keeping a watch on publicity and politics. He gives himself out as a man-about-town, and is supposed to make a good thing out of the market. Maybe he does, though I notice that generally the market makes a good thing out of the smart guy who tries to beat it."

"Not a particularly desirable person for a colleague."

"I doubt if he'd be Marrineal's colleague exactly. The inside of the newspaper isn't his game. More likely he's making himself attractive and useful to Marrineal just to find out what he's up to with his paper."

"I'll show him something interesting if I get hold of that editorial page."

"Son, are you up to it, d'you think?" asked Edmonds with affectionate solicitude. "It takes a lot of experience to handle policies."

"I'll have you with me, won't I, Pop? Besides, if my little scheme works, I'm going out to gather experience like a bee after honey."

"We'll make a queer team, we three," mused the veteran, shaking his bony head, as he leaned forward over his tiny pipe. His protuberant forehead seemed to overhang the idea protectively. Or perhaps threateningly.

"None of us looks at a newspaper from the same angle or as the same kind of a machine as the others view it."

"Never mind our views. They'll assimilate. What about his?"

"Ah! I wish I knew. But he wants something. Like all of us." A shade passed across the clearly modeled severity of the face. Edmonds sighed.

"I don't know but that I'm too old for this kind of experiment. Yet I've fallen for the temptation."

"Pop," said Banneker with abrupt irrelevance, "there's a line from Emerson that you make me think of when you look like that. 'His sad lucidity of soul.'"

"Do I? But it isn't Emerson. It's Matthew Arnold."

"Where do you find time for poetry, you old wheelhorse! Never mind; you ought to be painted as the living embodiment of that line."

"Or as a wooden automaton, jumping at the end of a special wire from 'our correspondent.' Ban, can you see Marrineal's hand on a wire?"

"If it's plain enough to be visible, I'm underestimating his tact. I'd like to have a lock of his hair to dream on to-night. I'm off to think things over, Pop. Good-night."

Banneker walked uptown, through dimmed streets humming with the harmonic echoes of the city's never-ending life, faint and delicate. He stopped at Sherry's, and at a small table in the side room sat down with a bottle of ale, a cigarette, and some stationery. When he rose, it was to mail a letter. That done, he went back to his costly little apartment upon which the rent would be due in a few days. He had the cash in hand: that was all right. As for the next month, he wondered humorously whether he would have the wherewithal to meet the recurring bill, not to mention others. However, the consideration was not weighty enough to keep him sleepless.

Custom kindly provides its own patent shock-absorbers to all the various organisms of nature; otherwise the whole regime would perish.

Necessarily a newspaper is among the best protected of organisms against shock: it deals, as one might say, largely in shocks, and its hand is subdued to what it works in. Nevertheless, on the following noon The Ledger office was agitated as it hardly would have been had Brooklyn Bridge fallen into the East River, or the stalest mummy in the Natural History Museum shown stirrings of life. A word was passing from eager mouth to incredulous ear.

Banneker had resigned.

CHAPTER XV

Looking out of the front window, into the decorum of Grove Street, Mrs.

Brashear could hardly credit the testimony of her glorified eyes. Could the occupant of the taxi indeed be Mr. Banneker whom, a few months before and most sorrowfully, she had sacrificed to the stern respectability of the house? And was it possible, as the very elegant trunk inscribed "E.B.--New York City" indicated, that he was coming back as a lodger? For the first time in her long and correct professional career, the landlady felt an unqualified bitterness in the fact that all her rooms were occupied.

The occupant of the taxi jumped out and ran lightly up the steps.

"How d'you do, Mrs. Brashear. Am I still excommunicated?"

"Oh, Mr. Banneker! I'm _so_ glad to see you. If I could tell you how often I've blamed myself--"