"
"Yes."
"And no longer?"
"No longer. It's a vengeful kind of vermin, Ban."
"Pop, am I a common, ordinary blackmailer? Or am I not?"
The other shook his head, grayed by a quarter-century of struggles and
problems. "It's a strange game, the newspaper game," he opined.
CHAPTER X
All had worked out, in the matter of The Searchlight, quite as much to
Mr. Ely Ives's satisfaction as to that of Banneker. From his boasted and
actual underground wire into that culture-bed of spiced sewage (at the
farther end of which was the facile brunette whom the visiting editor
had so harshly treated), he had learned the main details of the
interview and reported them to Mr. Marrineal.
"Will Banneker now be good?" rhetorically queried Ives, pursing up his
small face into an expression of judicious appreciation. "He _will_ be
good!"
Marrineal gave the subject his habitual calm and impersonal
consideration. "He hasn't been lately," he observed. "Several of his
editorials have had quite the air of challenge."
"That was before he turned blackmailer. Blackmail," philosophized the
astute Ives, "is a gun that you've got to keep pointed all the time."
"I see. So long as he has Bussey covered by the muzzle of The Patriot,
The Searchlight behaves itself.
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