uite know--We'll talk of that later."

While Banneker was packing in his room, Smith, seated on the
window-sill, remarked:

"I ought to tell you that we have to go through a bad district to get
there."

"The Tunnel Gang?" asked Banneker, wise in the plague spots of the city.

"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 wit