h it."

Banneker felt a new and surprised respect for his host. He could
forecast the kind of small city newspaper that Smith would make;
careful, conscientious, regular in politics, loyal to what it deemed the
best interests of the community, single-minded in its devotion to the
Smith family and its properties; colorless, characterless, and without
vision or leadership in all that a newspaper should, according to
Banneker's opinion, stand for. So he talked with the fervor of an
enthusiast, a missionary, a devotee, who saw in that daily chronicle of
the news an agency to stir men's minds and spur their thoughts, if need
be, to action; at the same time the mechanism and instrument of power,
of achievement, of success. Fentriss Smith listened and was troubled in
spirit by these unknown fires. He had supposed respectability to be the
final aim and end of a sound newspaper tradition.

The apparent intimacy which had sprung up between twenty-five-dollar
Smith and the reserved, almost hermit-like Banneker was the subject of
curious and amused commentary in The Ledger office. Mallory hazarded a
humorous guess that Banneker was tutoring Smith in the finer arts of
journalism, which was not so far amiss as its proponent might have
supposed.

The Great Heat broke several evenings later in a drench of rain and
wind. This, being in itself important news, kept Banneker late at his
writing, and he had told his host not to wait, that he would join him on
the yacht sometime about midnight. So Smith had gone on alone.

The next morning Tommy Burt, lounging into the office from an early
assignment, approached the City Desk with a twinkle far back in his
lively eyes.

"Hear anything of a shoot-fest up in the Bad Lands last night?" he
asked.

"Not yet," replied Mr. Greenough. "They're getting to be everyday
occurrences up there. Is it on the police slips, Mr. Mallory?"

"No. Nothing in that line," answered the assistant, looking over his
assortment.

"Police are probably suppressing it," opined Burt.

"Have you got the story?" queried Mr. Greenough.

"In outline. It isn't really my story."

"Whose is it, then?"

"That's part of it." Tommy Burt leaned against Mallory's desk and
appeared to be revolving some delectable thought in his mind.

"Tommy," said Mallory, "they didn't open that committee meeting you've
been attending with a corkscrew, did they?"

"I'm intoxicated with the chaste beauties of my story, which isn't
min