BOBBY BEGINS TO GIVE TESTIMONY THAT HE IS OLD JOHN BURNIT'S SON

Closeted with Jolter and Brown, and mapping out with them the dangerous campaign into which they had plunged, Bobby did not leave the office of the _Bulletin_ until six o'clock. At the curb, just as he was about to step into his waiting machine, Biff Bates hailed him with vast enthusiasm.

"Go to it, Bobby!" said he. "I'm backing you across the board, win, place and show; but let me give you a hot tip right from the stables.

You want to be afraid to go home in the dark, or Stone's lobbygows will lean on you with a section of plumbing."

"I've thought of that, Biff," laughed Bobby; "and I think I'll organize a band of murderers of my own."

Johnson, whom Bobby had quite forgotten in the stress of the day, joined them at this moment. Thirty years as head bookkeeper and confidential adviser in old John Burnit's merchandise establishment had not fitted lean Johnson for the less dignified and more flurried work of a newspaper office, even in the business department, and he was looking very much f.a.gged.

"Well, Johnson, what do you think of my first issue of the _Bulletin_?" asked Bobby pleasantly.

Johnson looked genuinely distressed.

"To tell you the truth, Mr. Burnit," said he, "I have not seen it. I never in all my life saw a place where there were so many interruptions to work. If we could only be back in your father's store, sir."

"We'll be back there before we quit," said Bobby confidently; "or I'll be in the incurable ward."

"I hope so, sir," said Johnson dismally, and strode across the street to catch his car; but he came back hastily to add: "I meant about the store; not about the asylum."

Biff Bates laughed as he clambered into the tonneau with Bobby.

"If you'd make a billion dollars, Bobby, but didn't get back your father's business that Silas Trimmer snaked away from you, Johnson would think you'd overlooked the one best bet."

"So would I," said Bobby soberly, and he had but very little more to say until the chauffeur stopped at Bobby's own door, where puffy old Applerod, who had been next to Johnson in his usefulness to old John Burnit, stood nervously awaiting him on the steps.

"Terrible, sir! Terrible!" spluttered Applerod the moment he caught sight of Bobby. "This open defiance of Mr. Stone will put entirely out of existence what little there is left of the Brightlight Electric Company."

"Cheer up, Applerod, for death must come to us all," encouraged Bobby.

"Such shreds and fragments of the Brightlight as there are left would have been wiped out anyhow; and frankly, if you must have it, I put you in there as general manager, when I shifted Johnson to the _Bulletin_ this morning, because there was nothing to manage."

Applerod threw up his hands in dismay.

"And there will be less. Oh, Mr. Burnit, if your father were only here!"

Bobby, whose suavity Applerod had never before seen ruffled, turned upon him angrily.

"I'm tired hearing about my father, Applerod," he declared. "I revere the governor's memory too much to want to be made angry by the mention of his name. Hereafter, kindly catch the idea, if you can, that I am my own man and must work out my own salvation; and I propose to do it!

Biff, you don't mind if I put off seeing you until to-morrow? I have a dinner engagement this evening and very little time to dress."

"His own man," said Applerod sorrowfully when Bobby had left them.

"John Burnit would be half crazy if he could know what a botch his son is making of things. I don't see how a man could let himself be cheated four times in business."

"I can tell you," retorted Biff. "All his old man ever did for him was to stuff his pockets with kale, and let him grow up into the sort of clubs where one sport says: 'I'm going to walk down to the corner.'

Says the other sport: 'I'll bet you see more red-headed girls on the way down than you do on the way back.' Says the first sport: 'You're on for a hundred.' He goes down to the corner and he comes back. 'How about the red-headed girls?' asks the second sport. 'I lose,' says the first sport; 'here's your hundred.' Now, when Bobby is left real money, he starts in to play the same open-face game, and when one of these business wolves tells him anything Bobby don't stop to figure whether the mut means what he says, or means something else that sounds like the same thing. Now, if Bobby was a simp they'd sting him in so many places that he'd be swelled all over, like an exhibition cream puff; but he ain't a simp. It took him four times to learn that he can't take a man's word in business. That's all he needed. Bobby's awake now, and more than that he's mad, and if I hear you make another crack that he ain't about all the candy I'll sick old Johnson on you,"

and with this dire threat Biff wheeled, leaving Mr. Applerod speechless with red-faced indignation.

It was just a quiet family dinner that Bobby attended that night at the Ellistons', with Uncle Dan and Aunt Constance Elliston at the head and foot of the table, and across from him the smiling face of Agnes.

He was so good to look at that Agnes was content just to watch him, but Aunt Constance noted his abstraction and chided him upon it.

"Really, Bobby," said she, "since you have gone into business you're ruined socially."

"Frankly, I don't mind," he replied, smiling. "I'd rather be ruined socially than financially. In spite of certain disagreeable features of it, I have a feeling upon me to-night that I'm going to like the struggle."

"You're starting a stiff one now," observed Uncle Dan dryly.

"Beginning an open fight against Sam Stone is a good deal like being suspended over Hades by a single hair--amidst a shower of Roman candles."

"That's putting it about right, I guess," admitted Bobby; "but I'm relying on the fact that the public at heart is decent."

"Do you remember, Bobby, what Commodore Vanderbilt said about the public?" retorted Uncle Dan. "They're decent, all right, but they won't stick together in any aggressive movement short of gunpowder. In the meantime, Stone has more entrenchments than even you can dream.

For instance, I should not wonder but that within a very short time I shall be forced to try my influence with you in his behalf."

"How?" asked Bobby incredulously.

"Well, I am trying to get a spur track from the X. Y. Z. Railroad to my factory on Spindle Street. The X. Y. Z. is perfectly willing to put in the track, and I'm trying to have the city council grant us a permit. Now, who is the city council?"

"Stone," Bobby was compelled to admit.

"Of course. I have already arranged to pay quite a sum of money to the capable and honest city councilman of that ward. The capable and honest councilman will go to Stone and give up about three-fourths of what I pay him. Then Stone will pa.s.s the word out to the other councilmen that he's for Alderman Holdup's spur track permit, and I get it. Very simple arrangement, and satisfactory, but, if they do not shove that measure through at their meeting to-morrow night, before Stone finds out any possible connection between you and me, the price of it will not be money. I'll be sent to you."

"I see," said Bobby in dismay. "In other words, it will be put flatly up to me; I'll either have to quit my attacks on Stone, or be directly responsible for your losing your valuable spur track."

"Exactly," said Uncle Dan.

Bobby drew a long breath.

"I'm very much afraid, Mr. Elliston, that you will have to do without your spur."

Uncle Dan's eyes twinkled.

"I'm willing," said he. "I have a good offer to sell that branch of my plant anyhow, and I think I'll dispose of it. I have been very frank with you about this, so that you will know exactly what to expect when other people come at you. You will be beset as you never were before."

"I have been looking for an injunction, myself."

"You will have no injunction, for Stone scarcely dares go publicly into his own courts," said Uncle Dan, with a pretty thorough knowledge, gained through experience, of the methods of the "Stone gang"; "though he might even use that as a last resort. That will be after intimidation fails, for it is quite seriously probable that they will hire somebody to beat you into insensibility. If that don't teach you the proper lesson, they will probably kill you."

Agnes looked up apprehensively, but catching Bobby's smile took this latter phase of the matter as a joke. Bobby himself was not deeply impressed with it, but before he went away that night Uncle Dan took him aside and urged upon him the seriousness of the matter.

"I'll fight them with their own weapons, then," declared Bobby. "I'll organize a counter band of thugs, and I'll block every move they make with one of the same sort. Somehow or other I think I am going to win."

"Of course you will win," said Agnes confidently, overhearing this last phrase; and with that most prized of all encouragement, the faith in his prowess of _the_ one woman, Bobby, for that night at least, felt quite contemptuous of the grilling fight to come.

His second issue of the _Bulletin_ contained on the front page a three-column picture of Sam Stone, with the same caption, together with a full-page article, written by Dillingham from data secured by himself and the others who were put upon the "story." This set forth the main iniquities of Sam Stone and his crew of munic.i.p.al grafters.

In the third day's issue the picture was reduced to two columns, occupying the left-hand upper corner of the front page, where Bobby ordered it to remain permanently as the slogan of the _Bulletin_; and now Dillingham began his long series of articles, taking up point by point the ramifications of Stone's machine, and coming closer and closer daily to people who would much rather have been left entirely out of the picture.

It was upon this third day that Bobby, becoming apprehensive merely because nothing had happened, received a visit from Frank Sharpe. Mr.

Sharpe was as nattily dressed as ever, and presented himself as pleasantly as a summer breeze across fields of clover.