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 w