d into the young man's study, to the lasting
detriment of a triolet.

"We can prove it," he exclaimed. "Gad! We can prove it!"

Graves regretfully dropped a blotter over his manuscript and advanced a
chair.

"I've suspected that there were men in this town who could lay Shelby
by the heels, were they to tell all they knew. The problem was to draw
them."

"You can't expect his understrappers to quarrel with their bread and
butter."

"No; that has been the stone of stumbling precisely, but we've got
around it. In this blessed case, Shelby himself did the quarrelling,
and thereby delivered himself into our hands."

Bernard Graves sat up.

"What have you found out?"

"I've found a man who seems to know of Shelby's crookedness, and is
willing to tell what he knows."

"Well?"

"Jap Hinchey."

Graves's face lengthened.

"That beast," said he.

"Did you expect a Sir Galahad for such a service?"

"What would the word of such a man avail?"

"As much as any informer's; it isn't a chivalrous office."

"Nor is ours in employing it, to my thinking; informer and reformer
sound perilously near alike. Still, as you delicately imply, we're not
Knights of the Round Table. What has the sot had to say to you?"

"Well, the fact is he hasn't told me anything specific," Sprague had to
admit. "The matter is still under negotiation, as one may say. Jasper
is coy."

"Oh!"

The lukewarm monosyllable voiced disillusionment. With a partial
return to the academic calm of his normal life Bernard Graves candidly
told himself that the actual basis of his resentment against Shelby was
trivial; that the editor's outlook on politics was Quixotic, not to say
Micawberesque; and that his own wisdom in venturing for such a cause,
with such a pilot, on such uncharted seas, was questionable to a degree.

Sprague was not devoid of intuition.

"I'm not rainbow-hunting this time," he put in quickly. "The fellow
knows something interesting, and he's ready to out with it. He was
employed in the Eureka quarries during the canal improvement, and saw
things, he says, that we would like to hear."

"You talked with him?"

"Yes; he accosted me in a side street late last night."

"If he's anxious to inform and reform, why doesn't he? I don't like
the look of it. What does he want?"

"You."

"He wants me?"

"He said he would speak plainly with you."

Graves's revulsion was fairly physical.

"You manage it, Volney," he en