typed sheets before him, began to read. Presently
his face flushed.

"Why, if you print this sort of thing, you'd have my office mobbed," he
cried indignantly.

"It's possible."

"It's outrageous! And this--if this isn't an incitement to lynching--You
wouldn't dare publish this!"

"Try me."

Major Bussey's wizened and philanthropic face took on the cast of
careful thought. At length he spoke with the manner of an elder
bestowing wisdom upon youth.

"A controversy such as this would do nobody any good. I have always been
opposed to journalistic backbitings. Therefore we will let this matter
lie. I will kill the paragraph. Not that I'm afraid of your threats; nor
of your pen, for that matter. But in the best interests of our common
profession--"

"Good-day," said Banneker, and walked out, leaving the Major stranded
upon the ebb tide of his platitudes.

Banneker retailed the episode to Edmonds, for his opinion.

"He's afraid of your gun, a little," pronounced the expert; "and more of
your pen. I think he'll keep faith in this."

"As long as I hold over him the threat of The Patriot."

"Yes."

"And no longer?"

"No longer. It's a vengeful kind of vermin, Ban."

"Pop, am I a common, ordinary blackmailer? Or am I not?"

The other shook his head, grayed by a quarter-century of struggles and
problems. "It's a strange game, the newspaper game," he opined.

CHAPTER X

All had worked out, in the matter of The Searchlight, quite as much to
Mr. Ely Ives's satisfaction as to that of Banneker. From his boasted and
actual underground wire into that culture-bed of spiced sewage (at the
farther end of which was the facile brunette whom the visiting editor
had so harshly treated), he had learned the main details of the
interview and reported them to Mr. Marrineal.

"Will Banneker now be good?" rhetorically queried Ives, pursing up his
small face into an expression of judicious appreciation. "He _will_ be
good!"

Marrineal gave the subject his habitual calm and impersonal
consideration. "He hasn't been lately," he observed. "Several of his
editorials have had quite the air of challenge."

"That was before he turned blackmailer. Blackmail," philosophized the
astute Ives, "is a gun that you've got to keep pointed all the time."

"I see. So long as he has Bussey covered by the muzzle of The Patriot,
The Searchlight behaves itself."

"It does. But if ever he laid down his gun, Bussey would make hash of
hi