up
my mind to win out or lose out on the capital you gave me. And I won't
take a cent more."

"That's business, too, son. I like that. But I hate to see you lose. By
publishing your editorial you're committing your paper absolutely to a
policy, and a fatal one. Well, I won't argue any more. But I haven't
given up yet."

"Well, that's over," said Hal, as his father departed, gently smoothing
down his silk hat. "And I hope that ends it."

"Do you?" McGuire Ellis raised a tuneful baritone in song:--

'You may think you've got 'em going,' said the bar-keep to the bum.
'But cheer up
And beer up.
The worst is yet to come!'

"Unless my estimate of E.M. Pierce is wrong," he continued, "you'll
begin to hear from the other newspapers soon."

So it proved. Advertising managers called up and talked interminably
over the telephone. Editors-in-chief wrote polite notes. One fellow
proprietor called. By all the canons of editorial courtesy they exhorted
Mr. Surtaine to hold his hand from the contemplated sacrilege against
their friend and patron, Elias M. Pierce. Equally polite, Mr. Surtaine
replied that the "Clarion" would print the news. How much of the news
would he print? All the news, now and forever, one and inseparable, or
words to that effect. Painfully and protestingly the noble fellowship of
the free and untrammeled press pointed out that if the "Clarion"
insisted on informing the public, they too, in self-defense, must supply
something in the way of information to cover themselves, loth though
they were so to do. But the burden of sin and vengeance would rest upon
the paper which forced them into such a course. Still patient, Hal found
refuge in truism: to wit, that what his fellow editors chose to do was
wholly and specifically their business. From the corollary, he
courteously refrained.

Meantime, the object of Editor Surtaine's scathing had not been idle. To
the indignant journalist, Miss Kathleen Pierce had appeared a brutal and
hardened scion of wealth and injustice. This was hardly a just view.
Careless she was, and unmindful of standards; but not cruel. In this
instance, panic, not callousness, had been the mainspring of her
apparent cruelty. She was badly scared; and when her angry father told
her what she might expect at the hands of a "yellow newspaper," she
became still more badly scared. In this frame of mind she fled for