antile copy of
diamond dealers, cheap tailors, installment furniture profiteers, the
lure of loan sharks and race-track tipsters, and the specious and deadly
fallacies of the medical quacks. Appealing as it did to an ignorant and
"easy" class of the public ("Banneker's First-Readers," Russell Edmonds
was wont to call them), The Patriot offered a profitable field for all
the pitfall-setters of print. The less that Banneker knew about them the
more comfortable would he be. So he turned his face away from those
columns.

The negative which he returned to Marrineal's question was no more or
less than that astute gentleman expected.

"We carried an editorial last week on cigarettes, 'There's a Yellow
Stain on Your Boy's Fingers--Is There Another on his Character?'"

"Yes. It is still bringing in letters."

"It is. Letters of protest."

"From the tobacco people?"

"Exactly. Mr. Banneker, don't you regard tobacco as a legitimate article
of use?"

"Oh, entirely. Couldn't do without it, myself."

"Why attack it, then, in your column?"

"Because my column," answered Banneker with perceptible emphasis on the
possessive, "doesn't believe that cigarettes are good for boys."

"Nobody does. But the effect of your editorial is to play into the hands
of the anti-tobacco people. It's an indiscriminate onslaught on all
tobacco. That's the effect of it."

"Possibly."

"And the result is that the tobacco people are threatening to cut us off
from their new advertising appropriation."

"Out of my department," said Banneker calmly.

Marrineal was a patient man. He pursued. "You have offended the medical
advertisers by your support of the so-called Honest Label Bill."

"It's a good bill."

"Nearly a quarter of our advertising revenue is from the patent-medicine
people."

"Mostly swindlers."

"They pay your salary," Marrineal pointed out.

"Not mine," said Banneker vigorously. "The paper pays my salary."

"Without the support of the very advertisers that you are attacking, it
couldn't continue to pay it. Yet you decline to admit any responsibility
to them."

"Absolutely. To them or for them."

"I confess I can't see your basis," said the reasonable Marrineal.
"Considering what you have received in income from the paper--"

"I have worked for it."

"Admitted. But that you should absorb practically all the profits--isn't
that a little lopsided, Mr. Banneker?"

"What is your proposition, Mr. Marrineal?"

Marrinea