onsidered as
news, this--"

Linder caught the word out of his mouth. "News!" he roared. "A fake
story ten years old, news? That ain't news! It's spite work. Even your
dirty paper, Waldemar, wouldn't rake that kind of muck up after ten
years. It'd be a boomerang. You'll have to put up a stronger line of
blackmail and bluff than that."

"Blackmail is perhaps the correct word technically," admitted the
newspaper owner, "but bluff--there you go wrong. You've forgotten one
thing; that Arbuthnot's arrest and confession would make the whole
story news. We stand ready to arrest Arbuthnot, and he stands ready to
confess."

There was a long, tense minute of silence. Then--

"What do you want?" The straight-to-the-point question was an admission
of defeat.

"Your announcement of withdrawal. I'd rather print that than the
Arbuthnot story."

There was a long silence. Finally the Honorable Linder dropped his hand
on the table. "You win," he declared curtly. "But you'll give me the
benefit, in the announcement, of bad health caused by the shock of the
explosion, to explain my quitting, Waldemar?"

"It will certainly make it more plausible," assented the newspaper owner
with a smile.

Linder turned on Average Jones.

"Did you dope this out, young fellow?" he demanded.

"Yes."

"Well, you've put me in the Down-and-Out-Club, all right. And I'm just
curious enough to want to know how you did it."

"By abstaining," returned Average Jones cryptically, "from the best wine
that ever came out of the Cosmic Club cellar."

CHAPTER II. RED DOT

From his inner sanctum, Average Jones stared obliquely out upon the
whirl of Fifth Avenue, warming itself under a late March sun.

In the outer offices a line of anxious applicants was being disposed of
by his trained assistants. To the advertising expert's offices had come
that day but three cases difficult enough to be referred to the Ad-Visor
himself. Two were rather intricate financial lures which Average Jones
was able to dispose of by a mere "Don't." The third was a Spiritualist
announcement behind which lurked a shrewd plot to entrap a senile
millionaire into a marriage with the medium. These having been settled,
the expert was free to muse upon a paragraph which had appeared in all
the important New York morning papers of the day before.

REWARD-$1,000 reward for information
as to slayer of Brindle Bulldog "Rags"
killed in office of Malcolm Dorr, Stenge