know that you would have been killed if it hadn't been for some
of the factory staff who saved you from the other guards--as you
deserved, for your foolhardiness?"

The young man's eyebrows went up a bit. "Don't bank too much on my
foolhardiness. I had a wall back of me. And there would have been
material for several funerals before they got me." He touched his
hip-pocket. "By the way, you seem to be well informed."

"I've been in 'phone communication with Sippiac since the regrettable
occurrence. It perhaps didn't occur to you to find out that the woman,
who is now under arrest, bit the guard very severely."

"Of course! Just like the rabbit bit the bulldog. You've got a lot of
thugs and strong-arm men doing your dirty work, that ought to be in
jail. If the newspapers here ever get onto the situation, it would make
pretty rough reading for you, Mr. Vanney."

The magnate looked at him with contemptuous amusement. "No newspaper of
decent standing prints that kind of socialistic stuff, my young friend."

"Why not?"

"Why not! Because of my position. Because the International Cloth
Company is a powerful institution of the most reputable standing, with
many lines of influence."

"And that is enough to keep the newspapers from printing an article
about conditions in Sippiac?" asked Banneker, deeply interested in this
phase of the question. "Is that the fact?"

It was not the fact; The Sphere, for one, would have handled the strike
on the basis of news interest, as Mr. Vanney well knew; wherefore he
hated and pretended to despise The Sphere. But for his own purposes he
answered:

"Not a paper in New York would touch it. Except," he added negligently,
"perhaps some lying, Socialist sheet. And let me warn you, Mr.
Banneker," he pursued in his suavest tone, "that you will find no place
for your peculiar ideas on The Ledger. In fact, I doubt whether you will
be doing well either by them or by yourself in going on their staff,
holding such views as you do."

"Do you? Then I'll tell them beforehand."

Mr. Vanney privately reflected that there was no need of this: _he_
intended to call up the editor-in-chief and suggest the unsuitability of
the candidate for a place, however humble, on the staff of a highly
respectable and suitably respectful daily.

Which he did. The message was passed on to Mr. Gordon, and, in his large
and tolerant soul, decently interred. One thing of which the managing
editor of The Ledger was n