d 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