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CHAPTER XIV


"Arrived safe" was the laconic message delivered to Miss Camilla Van
Arsdale by Banneker's substitute when, after a haggard night, she rode
over in the morning for news.

Banneker himself returned on the second noon, after much and roundabout
wayfaring. He had little to say of the night journey; nothing of the
peril escaped. Miss Welland had caught a morning train for the East. She
was none the worse for the adventurous trip. Camilla Van Arsdale, noting
his rapt expression and his absent, questing eyes, wondered what
underlay such reticence.... What had been the manner of their parting?

It had, indeed, been anti-climax. Both had been a little shy, a little
furtive. Each, perhaps feeling a mutual strain, wanted the parting over,
restlessly desiring the sedative of thought and quiet memory after that
stress. The desperate peril from which they had been saved seemed a
lesser crisis, leading from a greater and more significant one; leading
to--what? For his part Banneker was content to "breathe and wait." When
they should meet again, it would be determined. How and when the
encounter might take place, he did not trouble himself to consider. The
whole universe was moulded and set for that event. Meantime the glory
was about him; he could remember, recall, repeat, interpret....

For the hundredth time--or was it the thousandth?--he reconstructed that
last hour of theirs together in the station at Miradero, waiting for the
train. What had they said to each other? Commonplaces, mostly, and at
times with effort, as if they were making conversation. They two! After
that passionate and revealing moment between life and death on the
island. What should he have said to her? Begged her to stay? On what
basis? How could he?.... As the distant roar of the train warned them
that the time of parting was close, it was she who broke through that
strange restraint, turning upon him her old-time limpid and resolute
regard.

"Ban; promise me something."

"Anything."

"There may be a time coming for us when you won't understand."

"Understand what?"

"Me. Perhaps I shan't understand myself."

"You'll always understand yourself, Io."

"If that comes--when that comes--Ban, there's something in the book,
_our_ book, that I've left you to read."

"'The Voices'?"

"Yes. I've fastened the pages together so that you can't read it too
soon."

"When, then?"

"When I tell you ... No; not when I tell you. When--oh, when you must!
You'll read it, and afterward, when you think of me, you'll think of
that, too. Will you?"

"Yes."

"Always?"

"Always."

"No matter what happens?"

"No matter what happens."

"It's like a litany." She laughed tremulously.... "Here's the train.
Good-bye, dear."

He felt the tips of slender fingers on his temples, the light, swift
pressure of cold lips on his mouth.... While the train pulled out, she
stood on the rear platform, looking, looking. She was very still. All
motion, all expression seemed centered in the steady gaze which dwindled
away from him, became vague ... featureless ... vanished in a lurch of
the car.

Banneker, at home again, planted a garden of dreams, and lived in it,
mechanically acceptant of the outer world, resentful of any intrusion
upon that flowerful retreat. Even of Miss Van Arsdale's.

Not for days thereafter did the Hunger come. It began as a little
gnawing doubt and disappointment. It grew to a devastating, ravening
starvation of the heart, for sign or sight or word of Io Welland. It
drove him out of his withered seclusion, to seek Miss Van Arsdale, in
the hope of hearing Io's name spoken. But Miss Van Arsdale scarcely
referred to Io. She watched Banneker with unconcealed anxiety.

... Why had there been no letter?...

Appeasement came in the form of a package addressed in her handwriting.
Avidly he opened it. It was the promised Bible, mailed from New York
City. On the fly-leaf was written "I.O.W. to E.B."--nothing more. He
went through it page by page, seeking marked passages. There was none.
The doubt settled down on him again. The Hunger bit into him more
savagely.

... Why didn't she write? A word! Anything!

... Had she written Miss Van Arsdale?

At first it was intolerable that he should be driven to ask about her
from any other person; about Io, who had clasped him in the Valley of
the Shadow, whose lips had made the imminence of death seem a light
thing! The Hunger drove him to it.

Yes; Miss Van Arsdale had heard. Io Welland was in New York, and well.
That was all. But Banneker felt an undermining reserve.

Long days of changeless sunlight on the desert, an intolerable glare.
From the doorway of the lonely station Banneker stared out over leagues
of sand and cactus, arid, sterile, hopeless, promiseless. Life was like
that. Four weeks now since Io had left him. And still, except for the
Bible, no word from her. No sign. Silence.

Why that? Anything but that! It was too unbearable to his helpless
masculine need of her. He could not understand it. He could not
understand anything. Except the Hunger. That he understood well enough
now....

At two o'clock of a savagely haunted night, Banneker staggered from his
cot. For weeks he had not known sleep otherwise than in fitful passages.
His brain was hot and blank. Although the room was pitch-dark, he
crossed it unerringly to a shelf and look down his revolver. Slipping on
overcoat and shoes, he dropped the weapon into his pocket and set out up
the railroad track. A half-mile he covered before turning into the
desert. There he wandered aimlessly for a few minutes, and after that
groped his way, guarding with a stick against the surrounding threat of
the cactus, for his eyes were tight closed. Still blind, he drew out the
pistol, gripped it by the barrel, and threw it, whirling high and far,
into the trackless waste. He passed on, feeling his uncertain way
patiently.

It took him a quarter of an hour to find the railroad track and set a
sure course for home, so effectually had he lost himself.... No chance
of his recovering that old friend. It had been whispering to him, in the
blackness of empty nights, counsels that were too persuasive.

Back in his room over the station he lighted the lamp and stood before
the few books which he kept with him there; among them Io's Bible and
"The Undying Voices," with the two pages still joined as her fingers had
left them. He was summoning his courage to face what might be the final
solution. When he must, she had said, he was to open and read. Well ...
he must. He could bear it no longer, the wordless uncertainty. He lifted
down the volume, gently parted the fastened pages and read. From out the
still, ordered lines, there rose to him the passionate cry of protest
and bereavement:

"............................Nevermore Alone upon the threshold of my
door Of individual life I shall command The uses of my soul, nor lift my
hand Serenely in the sunshine as before, Without the sense of that which
I forbore--Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land Doom takes to part
us, leaves thy heart in mine With pulses that beat double. What I do And
what I dream include thee, as the wine Must taste of its own grapes. And
when I sue God for myself, He hears that name of thine And sees within
my eyes the tears of two."

Over and over he read it with increasing bewilderment, with increasing
fear, with slow-developing comprehension. If that was to be her farewell
... but why! Io, the straightforward, the intrepid, the exponent of fair
play and the rules of the game!... Had it been only a game? No; at least
he knew better than that.

What could it all mean? Why that medium for her message? Should he write
and ask her? But what was there to ask or say, in the face of her
silence? Besides, he had not even her address. Miss Camilla could
doubtless give him that. But would she? How much did she understand? Why
had she turned so unhelpful?

Banneker sat with his problem half through a searing night; and the
other half of the night he spent in writing. But not to Io.

At noon Camilla Van Arsdale rode up to the station.

"Are you ill, Ban?" was her greeting, as soon as she saw his face.

"No, Miss Camilla. I'm going away."

She nodded, confirming not so much what he said as a fulfilled suspicion
of her own. "New York is a very big city," she said.

"I haven't said that I was going to New York."

"No; there is much you haven't said."

"I haven't felt much like talking. Even to you."

"Don't go, Ban."

"I've got to. I've got to get away from here."

"And your position with the railroad?"

"I've resigned. It's all arranged." He pointed to the pile of letters,
his night's work.

"What are you going to do?"

"How do I know! I beg your pardon, Miss Camilla. Write, I suppose."

"Write here."

"There's nothing to write about."

The exile, who had spent her years weaving exquisite music from the
rhythm of desert winds and the overtones of the forest silence, looked
about her, over the long, yellow-gray stretches pricked out with hints
of brightness, to the peaceful refuge of the pines, and again to the
naked and impudent meanness of the town. Across to her ears, borne on
the air heavy with rain still unshed, came the rollicking, ragging
jangle of the piano at the Sick Coyote.

"Aren't there people to write about there?" she said. "Tragedies and
comedies and the human drama? Barrie found it in a duller place."

"Not until he had seen the world first," he retorted quickly. "And I'm
not a Barrie.... I can't stay here, Miss Camilla."

"Poor Ban! Youth is always expecting life to fulfill itself. It
doesn't."

"No; it doesn't--unless you make it."

"And how will you make it?"

"I'm going to get on a newspaper."

"It isn't so easy as all that, Ban."

"I've been writing."

In the joyous flush of energy, evoked under the spell of Io's
enchantment, he had filled his spare hours with work, happy, exuberant,
overflowing with a quaint vitality. A description of the desert in
spate, thumb-nail sketches from a station-agent's window, queer little
flavorous stories of crime and adventure and petty intrigue in the town;
all done with a deftness and brevity that was saved from being too
abrupt only by broad touches of color and light. And he had had a
letter. He told Miss Van Arsdale of it.

"Oh, if you've a promise, or even a fair expectation of a place. But,
Ban, I wouldn't go to New York, anyway."

"Why not?"

"It's no use."

His strong eyebrows went up. "Use?"

"You won't find her there."

"She's not in New York?"

"No."

"You've heard from her, then? Where is she?"

"Gone abroad."

Upon that he meditated. "She'll come back, though."

"Not to you."

He waited, silent, attentive, incredulous.

"Ban; she's married."

"Married!"

The telegraph instrument clicked in the tiny rhythm of an elfin
bass-drum. "O.S. O.S." Click. Click. Click-click-click. Mechanically
responsive to his office he answered, and for a moment was concerned
with some message about a local freight. When he raised his face again,
Miss Van Arsdale read there a sick and floundering skepticism.

"Married!" he repeated. "Io! She couldn't."

The woman, startled by the conviction in his tone, wondered how much
that might imply.

"She wrote me," said she presently.

"That she was married?"

"That she would be by the time the letter reached me."

("You will think me a fool," the girl had written impetuously, "and
perhaps a cruel fool. But it is the wise thing, really. Del Eyre is so
safe! He is safety itself for a girl like me. And I have discovered that
I can't wholly trust myself.... Be gentle with him, and make him do
something worth while.")

"Ah!" said Ban. "But that--"

"And I have the newspaper since with an account of the wedding.... Ban!
Don't look like that!"

"Like what?" said he stupidly.

"You look like Pretty Willie as I saw him when he was working himself up
for the killing." Pretty Willie was the soft-eyed young desperado who
had cleaned out the Sick Coyote.

"Oh, I'm not going to kill anybody," he said with a touch of grim
amusement for her fears. "Not even myself." He rose and went to the
door. "Do you mind, Miss Camilla?" he added appealingly.

"You want me to leave you now?"

He nodded. "I've got to think."

"When would you leave, Ban, if you do go?"

"I don't know."

On the following morning he went, after a night spent in arranging,
destroying, and burning. The last thing to go into the stove, 67 S 4230,
was a lock of hair, once glossy, but now stiffened and stained a dull
brown, which he had cut from the wound on Io's head that first, strange
night of theirs, the stain of her blood that had beaten in her heart,
and given life to the sure, sweet motion of her limbs, and flushed in
her cheeks, and pulsed in the warm lips that she had pressed to his--Why
could they not have died together on their dissolving island, with the
night about them, and their last, failing sentience for each other!

The flame of the greedy stove licked up the memento, but not the memory.

"You must not worry about me," he wrote in the note left with his
successor for Miss Van Arsdale. "I shall be all right. I am going to
succeed."




PART II

THE VISION




CHAPTER I


Mrs. Brashear's rooming-house on Grove Street wore its air of
respectability like a garment, clean and somber, in an environment of
careful behavior. Greenwich Village, not having fully awakened to the
commercial advantages of being a _locale_, had not yet stretched between
itself and the rest of New York that gauzy and iridescent curtain of
sprightly impropriety and sparkling intellectual naughtiness, since
faded to a lather tawdry pattern. An early pioneer of the Villager type,
emancipated of thought and speech, chancing upon No. 11 Grove, would
have despised it for its lack of atmosphere and its patent conservatism.
It did not go out into the highways and byways, seeking prospective
lodgers. It folded its hands and waited placidly for them to come. When
they came, it pondered them with care, catechized them tactfully, and
either rejected them with courteous finality or admitted them on
probation. Had it been given to self-exploitation, it could have boasted
that never had it harbored a bug or a scandal within its doors.

Now, on this filmy-soft April day it was nonplussed. A type new to its
experience was applying for a room, and Mrs. Brashear, who was not only
the proprietress, but, as it were, the familiar spirit and incarnation
of the institution, sat peering near-sightedly and in some perturbation
of soul at the phenomenon. He was young, which was against him, and of a
winning directness of manner, which was in his favor, and extremely good
to look at, which was potential of complications, and encased in
clothing of an uncompromising cut and neutral pattern (to wit; No. 45 T
370, "an ideal style for a young business man of affairs; neat,
impressive and dignified"), which was reassuring.

"My name is Banneker," he had said, immediately the door was opened to
him. "Can I get a room here?"

"There is a room vacant," admitted the spirit of the house unwillingly.

"I'd like to see it."

As he spoke, he was mounting the stairs; she must, perforce, follow. On
the third floor she passed him and led the way to a small, morosely
papered front room, almost glaringly clean.

"All right, if I can have a work-table in it and if it isn't too much,"
he said, after one comprehensive glance around.

"The price is five dollars a week."

Had Banneker but known it, this was rather high. The Brashear
rooming-house charged for its cleanliness, physical and moral. "Can I
move in at once?" he inquired.

"I don't know you nor anything about you, Mr. Banneker," she replied,
but not until they had descended the stairs and were in the cool, dim
parlor. At the moment of speaking, she raised a shade, as if to help in
the determination.

"Is that necessary? They didn't ask me when I registered at the hotel."

Mrs. Brashear stared, then smiled. "A hotel is different. Where are you
stopping?"

"At the St. Denis."

"A very nice place. Who directed you here?"

"No one. I strolled around until I found a street I liked, and looked
around until I found a house I liked. The card in the window--"

"Of course. Well, Mr. Banneker, for the protection of the house I must
have references."

"References? You mean letters from people?"

"Not necessarily. Just a name or two from whom I can make inquiries. You
have friends, I suppose."

"No."

"Your family--"

"I haven't any."

"Then the people in the place where you work. What is your business, by
the way?"

"I expect to go on a newspaper."

"Expect?" Mrs. Brashear stiffened in defense of the institution. "You
have no place yet?"

He answered not her question, but her doubt. "As far as that is
concerned, I'll pay in advance."

"It isn't the financial consideration," she began loftily--"alone," she
added more honestly. "But to take in a total stranger--"

Banneker leaned forward to her. "See here, Mrs. Brashear; there's
nothing wrong about me. I don't get drunk. I don't smoke in bed. I'm
decent of habit and I'm clean. I've got money enough to carry me.
Couldn't you take me on my say-so? Look me over."

Though it was delivered with entire gravity, the speech provoked a tired
and struggling smile on the landlady's plain features. She looked.

"Well?" he queried pleasantly. "What do you think? Will you take a
chance?"

That suppressed motherliness which, embodying the unformulated desire to
look after and care for others, turns so many widows to taking lodgers,
found voice in Mrs. Brashear's reply:

"You've had a spell of sickness, haven't you?"

"No," he said, a little sharply. "Where did you get that idea?"

"Your eyes look hot."

"I haven't been sleeping very well. That's all."

"Too bad. You've had a loss, maybe," she ventured sympathetically.

"A loss? No.... Yes. You might call it a loss. You'll take me, then?"

"You can move in right away," said Mrs. Brashear recklessly.

So the Brashear rooming-house took into its carefully guarded interior
the young and unknown Mr. Banneker--who had not been sleeping well. Nor
did he seem to be sleeping well in his new quarters, since his light was
to be seen glowing out upon the quiet street until long after midnight;
yet he was usually up betimes, often even before the moving spirit of
the house, herself. A full week had he been there before his fellow
lodgers, self-constituted into a Committee on Membership, took his case
under consideration in full session upon the front steps. None had had
speech with him, but it was known that he kept irregular hours.

"What's his job: that's what I'd like to know," demanded in a tone of
challenge, young Wickert, a man of the world who clerked in the
decorative department of a near-by emporium.

"Newsboy, I guess," said Lambert, the belated art-student of thirty-odd
with a grin. "He's always got his arms full of papers when he comes in."

"And he sits at his table clipping pieces out of them and arranging them
in piles," volunteered little Mrs. Bolles, the trained nurse on the top
floor. "I've seen him as I go past."

"Help-wanted ads," suggested Wickert, who had suffered experience in
that will-o'-the-wisp chase.

"Then he hasn't got a job," deduced Mr. Hainer, a heavy man of heavy
voice and heavy manner, middle-aged, a small-salaried accountant.

"Maybe he's got money," suggested Lambert.

"Or maybe he's a dead beat; he looks on the queer," opined young
Wickert.

"He has a very fine and sensitive face. I think he has been ill." The
opinion came from a thin, quietly dressed woman of the early worn-out
period of life, who sat a little apart from the others. Young Wickert
started a sniff, but suppressed it, for Miss Westlake was held locally
in some degree of respect, as being "well-connected" and having
relatives who called on her in their own limousines, though seldom.

"Anybody know his name?" asked Lambert.

"Barnacle," said young Wickert wittily. "Something like that, anyway.
Bannsocker, maybe. Guess he's some sort of a Swede."

"Well, I only hope he doesn't clear out some night with his trunk on his
back and leave poor Mrs. Brashear to whistle," declared Mrs. Bolles
piously.

The worn face of the landlady, with its air of dispirited motherliness,
appeared in the doorway. "Mr. Banneker is a _gentleman_," she said.

"Gentleman" from Mrs. Brashear, with that intonation, meant one who, out
of or in a job, paid his room rent. The new lodger had earned the title
by paying his month in advance. Having settled that point, she withdrew,
followed by the two other women. Lambert, taking a floppy hat from the
walnut rack in the hall, went his way, leaving young Wickert and Mr.
Hainer to support the discussion, which they did in tones less discreet
than the darkness warranted.

"Where would he hail from, would you think?" queried the elder. "Iowa,
maybe? Or Arkansas?"

"Search me," answered young Wickert. "But it was a small-town carpenter
built those honest-to-Gawd clothes. I'd say the corn-belt."

"Dressed up for the monthly meeting of the Farmers' Alliance, all but
the oil on his hair. He forgot that," chuckled the accountant.

"He's got a fine chance in Nuh Yawk--of buying a gold brick cheap,"
prophesied the worldly Wickert out of the depths of his metropolitan
experience. "Somebody ought to put him onto himself."

A voice from the darkened window above said, with composure, "That will
be all right. I'll apply to you for advice."

"Oh, Gee!" whispered young Wickert, in appeal to his companion. "How
long's he been there?"

Acute hearing, it appeared, was an attribute of the man above, for he
answered at once:

"Just put my head out for a breath of air when I heard your kind
expressions of solicitude. Why? Did I miss something that came earlier?"

Mr. Hainer melted unostentatiously into the darkness. While young
Wickert was debating whether his pride would allow him to follow this
prudent example, the subject of their over-frank discussion appeared at
his elbow. Evidently he was as light of foot as he was quick of ear.
Meditating briefly upon these physical qualities, young Wickert said, in
a deprecatory tone:

"We didn't mean to get fresh with you. It was just talk."

"Very interesting talk."

Wickert produced a suspiciously jeweled case. "Have a cigarette?"

"I have some of my own, thank you."

"Give you a light?"

The metropolitan worldling struck a match and held it up. This was on
the order of strategy. He wished to see Banneker's face. To his relief
it did not look angry or even stern. Rather, it appeared thoughtful.
Banneker was considering impartially the matter of his apparel.

"What is the matter with my clothes?" he asked.

"Why--well," began Wickert, unhappy and fumbling with his ideas; "Oh,
_they_'re all right."

"For a meeting of the Farmers' Alliance." Banneker was smiling
good-naturedly. "But for the East?"

"Well, if you really want to know," began Wickert doubtfully. "If you
won't get sore--" Banneker nodded his assurance. "Well, they're jay. No
style. No snap. Respectable, and that lets 'em out."

"They don't look as if they were made in New York or for New York?"

Young Mr. Wickert apportioned his voice equitably between a laugh and a
snort. "No: nor in Hoboken!" he retorted. "Listen, 'bo," he added, after
a moment's thought. "You got to have a smooth shell in Nuh Yawk. The
human eye only sees the surface. Get me? And it judges by the surface."
He smoothed his hands down his dapper trunk with ineffable complacency.
"Thirty-eight dollars, this. Bernholz Brothers, around on Broadway. Look
it over. That's a cut!"

"Is that how they're making them in the East?" doubtfully asked the
neophyte, reflecting that the pinched-in snugness of the coat, and the
flare effect of the skirts, while unquestionably more impressive than
his own box-like garb, still lacked something of the quiet distinction
which he recalled in the clothes of Herbert Cressey. The thought of that
willing messenger set him to groping for another sartorial name. He
hardly heard Wickert say proudly:

"If Bernholz's makes 'em that way, you can bet it's up to the
split-second of date, and _maybe_ they beat the pistol by a jump. I
bluffed for a raise of five dollars, on the strength of this outfit, and
got it off the bat. There's the suit paid for in two months and a pair
of shoes over." He thrust out a leg, from below the sharp-pressed
trouser-line of which protruded a boot trimmed in a sort of bizarre
fretwork. "Like me to take you around to Bernholz's?"

Banneker shook his head. The name for which he sought had come to him.
"Did you ever hear of Mertoun, somewhere on Fifth Avenue?"

"Yes. And I've seen Central Park and the Statue of Liberty," railed the
other. "Thinkin' of patternizing Mertoun, was you?"

"Yes, I'd like to."

"Like to! There's a party at the Astorbilt's to-morrow night; you'd
_like_ to go to that, wouldn't you? Fat chance!" said the disdainful and
seasoned cit. "D'you know what Mertoun would do to you? Set you back a
hundred simoleons soon as look at you. And at that you got to have a
letter of introduction like gettin' in to see the President of the
United States or John D. Rockefeller. Come off, my boy! Bernholz's 'll
fix you just as good, all but the label. Better come around to-morrow."

"Much obliged, but I'm not buying yet. Where would you say a fellow
would have a chance to see the best-dressed men?"

Young Mr. Wickert looked at once self-conscious and a trifle miffed, for
in his own set he was regarded as quite the mould of fashion. "Oh, well,
if you want to pipe off the guys that _think_ they're the whole thing,
walk up the Avenue and watch the doors of the clubs and the swell
restaurants. At that, they haven't got anything on some fellows that
don't spend a quarter of the money, but know what's what and don't let
grafters like Mertoun pull their legs," said he. "Say, you seem to know
what you want, all right, all right," he added enviously. "You ain't
goin' to let this little old town bluff you; ay?"

"No. Not for lack of a few clothes. Good-night," replied Banneker,
leaving in young Wickert's mind the impression that he was "a queer
gink," but also, on the whole, "a good guy." For the worldling was only
small, not mean of spirit.

Banneker might have added that one who had once known cities and the
hearts of men from the viewpoint of that modern incarnation of Ulysses,
the hobo, contemptuous and predatory, was little likely to be overawed
by the most teeming and headlong of human ant-heaps. Having joined the
ant-heap, Banneker was shrewdly concerned with the problem of conforming
to the best type of termite discoverable. The gibes of the doorstep
chatterers had not aroused any new ambition; they had merely given point
to a purpose deferred because of other and more immediate pressure.
Already he had received from Camilla Van Arsdale a letter rich in
suggestion, hint, and subtly indicated advice, with this one passage of
frank counsel:

If I were writing, spinster-aunt-wise, to any one else in your position,
I should be tempted to moralize and issue warnings about--well, about
the things of the spirit. But you are equipped, there. Like the
"Master," you will "go your own way with inevitable motion." With the
outer man--that is different. You have never given much thought to that
phase. And you have an asset in your personal appearance. I should not
be telling you this if I thought there were danger of your becoming
vain. But I really think it would be a good investment for you to put
yourself into the hands of a first-class tailor, and follow his advice,
in moderation, of course. Get the sense of being fittingly turned out by
going where there are well-dressed people; to the opera, perhaps, and
the theater occasionally, and, when you can afford it, to a good
restaurant. Unless the world has changed, people will look at you. _But
you must not know it_. Important, this is!... I could, of course, give
you letters of introduction. "_Les morts vont vite_," it is true, and I
am dead to that world, not wholly without the longings of a would-be
_revenant_; but a ghost may still claim some privileges of memory, and
my friends would be hospitable to you. Only, I strongly suspect that you
would not use the letters if I gave them. You prefer to make your own
start; isn't it so? Well; I have written to a few. Sooner or later you
will meet with them. Those things always happen even in New York.... Be
sure to write me all about the job when you get it--

Prudence dictated that he should be earning something before he invested
in expensive apparel, be it never so desirable and important. However,
he would outfit himself just as soon as a regular earning capacity
justified his going into his carefully husbanded but dwindling savings.
He pictured himself clad as a lily of the field, unconscious of
perfection as Herbert Cressey himself, in the public haunts of fashion
and ease; through which vision there rose the searing prospect of thus
encountering Io Welland. What was her married name? He had not even
asked when the news was broken to him; had not wanted to ask; was done
with all that for all time.

He was still pathetically young and inexperienced. And he had been badly
hurt.




CHAPTER II


Dust was the conspicuous attribute of the place. It lay, flat and
toneless, upon the desk, the chairs, the floor; it streaked the walls.
The semi-consumptive office "boy's" middle-aged shoulders collected it.
It stirred in the wake of quiet-moving men, mostly under thirty-five,
who entered the outer door, passed through the waiting-room, and
disappeared behind a partition. Banneker felt like shaking himself lest
he should be eventually buried under its impalpable sifting. Two hours
and a half had passed since he had sent in his name on a slip of paper,
to Mr. Gordon, managing editor of the paper. On the way across Park Row
he had all but been persuaded by a lightning printer on the curb to have
a dozen tasty and elegant visiting-cards struck off, for a quarter; but
some vague inhibition of good taste checked him. Now he wondered if a
card would have served better.

While he waited, he checked up the actuality of a metropolitan newspaper
entrance-room, as contrasted with his notion of it, derived from motion
pictures. Here was none of the bustle and hurry of the screen. No brisk
and earnest young figures with tense eyes and protruding notebooks
darted feverishly in and out; nor, in the course of his long wait, had
he seen so much as one specimen of that invariable concomitant of all
screen journalism, the long-haired poet with his flowing tie and neatly
ribboned manuscript. Even the office "boy," lethargic, neutrally polite,
busy writing on half-sheets of paper, was profoundly untrue to the
pictured type. Banneker wondered what the managing editor would be like;
would almost, in the wreckage of his preconceived notions, have accepted
a woman or a priest in that manifestation, when Mr. Gordon appeared and
was addressed by name by the hollow-chested Cerberus. Banneker at once
echoed the name, rising.

The managing editor, a tall, heavy man, whose smoothly fitting cutaway
coat seemed miraculously to have escaped the plague of dust, stared at
him above heavy glasses.

"You want to see me?"

"Yes. I sent in my name."

"Did you? When?"

"At two-forty-seven, thirty," replied the visitor with railroad
accuracy.

The look above the lowered glasses became slightly quizzical. "You're
exact, at least. Patient, too. Good qualities for a newspaper man.
That's what you are?"

"What I'm going to be," amended Banneker.

"There is no opening here at present."

"That's formula, isn't it?" asked the young man, smiling.

The other stared. "It is. But how do you know?"

"It's the tone, I suppose. I've had to use it a good deal myself, in
railroading."

"Observant, as well as exact and patient. Come in. I'm sorry I misplaced
your card. The name is--?"

"Banneker, E. Banneker."

Following the editor, he passed through a large, low-ceilinged room,
filled with desk-tables, each bearing a heavy crystal ink-well full of a
fluid of particularly virulent purple. A short figure, impassive as a
Mongol, sat at a corner desk, gazing out over City Hall Park with a rapt
gaze. Across from him a curiously trim and graceful man, with a strong
touch of the Hibernian in his elongated jaw and humorous gray eyes,
clipped the early evening editions with an effect of highly judicious
selection. Only one person sat in all the long files of the work-tables,
littered with copy-paper and disarranged newspapers; a dark young giant
with the discouraged and hurt look of a boy kept in after school. All
this Banneker took in while the managing editor was disposing, usually
with a single penciled word or number, of a sheaf of telegraphic
"queries" left upon his desk. Having finished, he swiveled in his chair,
to face Banneker, and, as he spoke, kept bouncing the thin point of a
letter-opener from the knuckles of his left hand. His hands were fat and
nervous.

"So you want to do newspaper work?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"I think I can make a go of it."

"Any experience?"

"None to speak of. I've written a few things. I thought you might
remember my name."

"Your name? Banneker? No. Why should I?"

"You published some of my things in the Sunday edition, lately. From
Manzanita, California."

"No. I don't think so. Mr. Homans." A graying man with the gait of a
marionnette and the precise expression of a rocking-horse, who had just
entered, crossed over. "Have we sent out any checks to a Mr. Banneker
recently, in California?"

The new arrival, who was copy-reader and editorial selecter for the
Sunday edition, repeated the name in just such a wooden voice as was to
be expected. "No," he said positively.

"But I've cashed the checks," returned Banneker, annoyed and bewildered.
"And I've seen the clipping of the article in the Sunday Sphere of--"

"Just a moment. You're not in The Sphere office. Did you think you were?
Some one has directed you wrong. This is The Ledger."

"Oh!" said Banneker. "It was a policeman that pointed it out. I suppose
I saw wrong." He paused; then looked up ingenuously. "But, anyway, I'd
rather be on The Ledger."

Mr. Gordon smiled broadly, the thin blade poised over a plump, reddened
knuckle.

"Would you! Now, why?"

"I've been reading it. I like the way it does things."

The editor laughed outright. "If you didn't look so honest, I would
think that somebody of experience had been tutoring you. How many other
places have you tried?"

"None."

"You were going to The Sphere first? On the promise of a job?"

"No. Because they printed what I wrote."

"The Sphere's ways are not our ways," pronounced Mr. Gordon primly.
"It's a fundamental difference in standards."

"I can see that."

"Oh, you can, can you?" chuckled the other. "But it's true that we have
no opening here."

(The Ledger never did have an "opening"; but it managed to wedge in a
goodly number of neophytes, from year to year, ninety per cent of whom
were automatically and courteously ejected after due trial. Mr. Gordon
performed a surpassing rataplan upon his long-suffering thumb-joint and
wondered if this queer and direct being might qualify among the
redeemable ten per cent.)

"I can wait." (They often said that.) "For a while," added the youth
thoughtfully.

"How long have you been in New York?"

"Thirty-three days."

"And what have you been doing?"

"Reading newspapers."

"No! Reading--That's rather surprising. All of them?"

"All that I could manage."

"Some were so bad that you couldn't worry through them, eh?" asked the
other with appreciation.

"Not that. But I didn't know the foreign languages except French, and
Spanish, and a little Italian."

"The foreign-language press, too. Remarkable!" murmured the other. "Do
you mind telling me what your idea was?"

"It was simple enough. As I wanted to get on a newspaper, I thought I
ought to find out what newspapers were made of."

"Simple, as you say. Beautifully simple! So you've devised for yourself
the little job of perfecting yourself in every department of journalism;
politics, finances, criminal, sports, society; all of them, eh?"

"No; not all," replied Banneker.

"Not? What have you left out?"

"Society news" was the answer, delivered less promptly than the other
replies.

Bestowing a twinkle of mingled amusement and conjecture upon the
applicant's clothing, Mr. Gordon said:

"You don't approve of our social records? Or you're not interested? Or
why is it that you neglect this popular branch?"

"Personal reasons."

This reply, which took the managing editor somewhat aback, was accurate
if not explanatory. Miss Van Arsdale's commentaries upon Gardner and his
quest had inspired Banneker with a contemptuous distaste for this type
of journalism. But chiefly he had shunned the society columns from dread
of finding there some mention of her who had been Io Welland. He was
resolved to conquer and evict that memory; he would not consciously put
himself in the way of anything that recalled it.

"Hum! And this notion of making an intensive study of the papers; was
that original with you?"

"Well, no, not entirely. I got it from a man who made himself a bank
president in seven years."

"Yes? How did he do that?"

"He started by reading everything he could find about money and coinage
and stocks and bonds and other financial paper. He told me that it was
incredible the things that financial experts didn't know about their own
business--the deep-down things--and that he guessed it was so with any
business. He got on top by really knowing the things that everybody was
supposed to know."

"A sound theory, I dare say. Most financiers aren't so revealing."

"He and I were padding the hoof together. We were both hoboes then."

The managing editor looked up, alert, from his knuckle-tapping. "From
bank president to hobo. Was his bank an important one?"

"The biggest in a medium-sized city."

"And does that suggest nothing to you, as a prospective newspaper man?"

"What? Write him up?"

"It would make a fairly sensational story."

"I couldn't do that. He was my friend. He wouldn't like it."

Mr. Gordon addressed his wedding-ring finger which was looking a bit
scarified. "Such an article as that, properly done, would go a long way
toward getting you a chance on this paper--Sit down, Mr. Banneker."

"You and I," said Banneker slowly and in the manner of the West, "can't
deal."

"Yes, we can." The managing editor threw his steel blade on the desk.
"Sit down, I tell you. And understand this. If you come on this
paper--I'm going to turn you over to Mr. Greenough, the city editor,
with a request that he give you a trial--you'll be expected to
subordinate every personal interest and advantage to the interests and
advantages of the paper, _except_ your sense of honor and fair-play. We
don't ask you to give that up; and if you do give it up, we don't want
you at all. What have you done besides be a hobo?"

"Railroading. Station-agent."

"Where were you educated?"

"Nowhere. Wherever I could pick it up."

"Which means everywhere. Ever read George Borrow?"

"Yes."

The heavy face of Mr. Gordon lighted up. "Ree-markable! Keep on. He's a
good offset to--to the daily papers. Writing still counts, on The
Ledger. Come over and meet Mr. Greenough."

The city editor unobtrusively studied Banneker out of placid,
inscrutable eyes, soft as a dove's, while he chatted at large about
theaters, politics, the news of the day. Afterward the applicant met the
Celtic assistant, Mr. Mallory, who broadly outlined for him the
technique of the office. With no further preliminaries Banneker found
himself employed at fifteen dollars a week, with Monday for his day off
and directions to report on the first of the month.

As the day-desk staff was about departing at six o'clock, Mr. Gordon
sauntered over to the city desk looking mildly apologetic.

"I practically had to take that young desert antelope on," said he.

"Too ingenuous to turn down," surmised the city editor.

"Ingenuous! He's heir to the wisdom of the ages. And now I'm afraid I've
made a ghastly mistake."

"Something wrong with him?"

"I've had his stuff in the Sunday Sphere looked up."

"Pretty weird?" put in Mallory, gliding into his beautifully fitting
overcoat.

"So damned good that I don't see how The Sphere ever came to take it.
Greenough, you'll have to find some pretext for firing that young
phenomenon as soon as possible."

Perfectly comprehending his superior's mode of indirect expression the
city editor replied:

"You think so highly of him as that?"

"Not one of our jobs will be safe from him if he once gets his foot
planted," prophesied the other with mock ruefulness. "Do you know," he
added, "I never even asked him for a reference."

"You don't need to," pronounced Mallory, shaking the last wrinkle out of
himself and lighting the cigarette of departure. "He's got it in his
face, if I'm any judge."

Highly elate, Banneker walked on springy pavements all the way to Grove
Street. Fifteen a week! He could live on that. His other income and
savings could be devoted to carrying out Miss Camilla's advice. For he
need not save any more. He would go ahead, fast, now that he had got his
start. How easy it had been.

Entering the Brashear door, he met plain, middle-aged little Miss
Westlake. A muffler was pressed to her jaw. He recalled having heard her
moving about her room, the cheapest and least desirable in the house,
and groaning softly late in the night; also having heard some lodgers
say that she was a typist with very little work. Obviously she needed a
dentist, and presumably she had not the money to pay his fee. In the
exultation of his good luck, Banneker felt a stir of helpfulness toward
this helpless person.

"Oh!" said he. "How do you do! Could you find time to do some typing for
me quite soon?"

It was said impulsively and was followed by a surge of dismay. Typing?
Type what? He had absolutely nothing on hand!

Well, he must get up something. At once. It would never do to disappoint
that pathetic and eager hope, as of a last-moment rescue, expressed in
the little spinster's quick flush and breathless, thankful affirmative.




CHAPTER III


Ten days' leeway before entering upon the new work. To which of scores
of crowding purposes could Banneker best put the time? In his offhand
way the instructive Mallory had suggested that he familiarize himself
with the topography and travel-routes of the Island of Manhattan.
Indefatigably he set about doing this; wandering from water-front to
water-front, invading tenements, eating at queer, Englishless
restaurants, picking up chance acquaintance with chauffeurs, peddlers,
street-fakers, park-bench loiterers; all that drifting and iridescent
scum of life which variegates the surface above the depths. Everywhere
he was accepted without question, for his old experience on the hoof had
given him the uncoded password which loosens the speech of furtive men
and wise. A receptivity, sensitized to a high degree by the inspiration
of new adventure, absorbed these impressions. The faithful pocket-ledger
was filling rapidly with notes and phrases, brisk and trenchant, set
down with no specific purpose; almost mechanically, in fact, but
destined to future uses. Mallory, himself no mean connoisseur of the
tumultuous and flagrant city, would perhaps have found matter foreign to
his expert apprehension could he have seen and translated the pages of 3
T 9901.

Banneker would go forward in the fascinating paths of exploration; but
there were other considerations.

The outer man, for example. The inner man, too; the conscious inner man
strengthened upon the strong milk of the philosophers, the priests, and
the prophets so strangely mingled in that library now stored with
Camilla Van Arsdale; exhilarated by the honey-dew of "The Undying
Voices," of Keats and Shelley, and of Swinburne's supernal rhythms,
which he had brought with him. One visit to the Public Library had quite
appalled him; the vast, chill orderliness of it. He had gone there,
hungry to chat about books! To the Public Library! Surely a Homeric joke
for grim, tomish officialdom. But tomish officialdom had not even
laughed at him; it was too official to appreciate the quality of such
side-splitting innocence.... Was he likely to meet a like
irresponsiveness when he should seek clothing for the body?

Watch the clubs, young Wickert had advised. Banneker strolled up Fifth
Avenue, branching off here and there, into the more promising side
streets.

It was the hour of the First Thirst; the institutions which cater to
this and subsequent thirsts drew steadily from the main stream of human
activity flowing past. Many gloriously clad specimens passed in and out
of the portals, socially sacred as in the quiet Fifth Avenue clubs,
profane as in the roaring, taxi-bordered "athletic" foundations; but
there seemed to the anxious observer no keynote, no homogeneous
character wherefrom to build as on a sure foundation. Lacking knowledge,
his instinct could find no starting-point; he was bewildered in vision
and in mind. Just off the corner of the quietest of the Forties, he met
a group of four young men, walking compactly by twos. The one nearest
him in the second line was Herbert Cressey. His heavy and rather dull
eye seemed to meet Banneker's as they came abreast. Banneker nodded,
half checking himself in his slow walk.

"How are you?" he said with an accent of surprise and pleasure.

Cressey's expressionless face turned a little. There was no response in
kind to Banneker's smile.

"Oh! H'ware you!" said he vaguely, and passed on.

Banneker advanced mechanically until he reached the corner. There he
stopped. His color had heightened. The smile was still on his lips; it
had altered, taken on a quality of gameness. He did not shake his fist
at the embodied spirit of metropolitanism before him, as had a famous
Gallic precursor of his, also a determined seeker for Success in a
lesser sphere; but he paraphrased Rastignac's threat in his own terms.

"I reckon I'll have to lick this town and lick it good before it learns
to be friendly."

A hand fell on his arm. He turned to face Cressey.

"You're the feller that bossed the wreck out there in the desert, aren't
you? You're--lessee--Banneker."

"I am." The tone was curt.

"Awfully sorry I didn't spot you at once." Cressey's genuineness was a
sufficient apology. "I'm a little stuffy to-day. Bachelor dinner last
night. What are you doing here? Looking around?"

"No. I'm living here."

"That so? So am I. Come into my club and let's talk. I'm glad to see
you, Mr. Banneker."

Even had Banneker been prone to self-consciousness, which he was not,
the extreme, almost monastic plainness of the small, neutral-fronted
building to which the other led him would have set him at ease. It gave
no inkling of its unique exclusiveness, and equally unique
expensiveness. As for Cressey, that simple, direct, and confident soul
took not the smallest account of Banneker's standardized clothing, which
made him almost as conspicuous in that environment as if he had entered
clad in a wooden packing-case. Cressey's creed in such matters was
complete; any friend of his was good enough for any environment to which
he might introduce him, and any other friend who took exceptions might
go farther!

"Banzai!" said the cheerful host over his cocktail. "Welcome to our
city. Hope you like it."

"I do," said Banneker, lifting his glass in response.

"Where are you living?"

"Grove Street."

Cressey knit his brows. "Where's that? Harlem?"

"No. Over west of Sixth Avenue."

"Queer kind of place to live, ain't it? There's a corkin' little suite
vacant over at the Regalton. Cheap at the money. Oh!-er-I-er-maybe--"

"Yes; that's it," smiled Banneker. "The treasury isn't up to bachelor
suites, yet awhile. I've only just got a job."

"What is it?"

"Newspaper work. The Morning Ledger."

"Reporting?" A dubious expression clouded the candid cheerfulness of the
other's face.

"Yes. What's the matter with that?"

"Oh; I dunno. It's a piffling sort of job, ain't it?"

"Piffling? How do you mean?"

"Well, I supposed you had to ask a lot of questions and pry into other
people's business and--and all that sorta thing."

"If nobody asked questions," pointed out Banneker, remembering Gardner's
resolute devotion to his professional ideals, "there wouldn't be any
news, would there?"

"Sure! That's right," agreed the gilded youth. "The Ledger's the
decentest paper in town, too. It's a gentleman's paper. I know a feller
on it; Guy Mallory; was in my class at college. Give you a letter to him
if you like."

Informed that Banneker already knew Mr. Mallory, his host expressed the
hope of being useful to him in any other possible manner--"any tips I
can give you or anything of that sort, old chap?"--so heartily that the
newcomer broached the subject of clothes.

"Nothin' easier," was the ready response. "I'll take you right down to
Mertoun. Just one more and we're off."

The one more having been disposed of: "What is it you want?" inquired
Cressey, when they were settled in the taxi which was waiting at the
club door for them.

"Well, what _do_ I want? You tell me."

"How far do you want to go? Will five hundred be too much?"

"No."

Cressey lost himself in mental calculations out of which he presently
delivered himself to this effect:

"Evening clothes, of course. And a dinner-jacket suit. Two business
suits, a light and a dark. You won't need a morning coat, I expect, for
a while. Anyway, we've got to save somethin' out for shirts and boots,
haven't we?"

"I haven't the money with me" remarked Banneker, his innocent mind on
the cash-with-order policy of Sears-Roebuck.

"Now, see here," said Cressey, good-humoredly, yet with an effect of
authority. "This is a game that's got to be played according to the
rules. Why, if you put down spot cash before Mertoun's eyes he'd faint
from surprise, and when he came to, he'd have no respect for you. And a
tailor's respect for you," continued Cressey, the sage, "shows in your
togs."

"When do I pay, then?"

"Oh, in three or four months he sends around a bill. That's more of a
reminder to come in and order your fall outfit than it is anything else.
But you can send him a check on account, if you feel like it."

"A check?" repeated the neophyte blankly. "Must I have a bank account?"

"Safer than a sock, my boy. And just as simple. To-morrow will do for
that, when we call on the shirt-makers and the shoe sharps. I'll put you
in my bank; they'll take you on for five hundred."

Arrived at Mertoun's, Banneker unobtrusively but positively developed a
taste of his own in the matter of hue and pattern; one, too, which
commanded Cressey's respect. The gilded youth's judgment tended toward
the more pronounced herringbones and homespuns.

"All right for you, who can change seven days in the week; but I've got
to live with these clothes, day in and day out," argued Banneker.

To which Cressey deferred, though with a sigh. "You could carry off
those sporty things as if they were woven to order for you," he
declared. "You've got the figure, the carriage, the--the
whatever-the-devil it is, for it."

Prospectively poorer by something more than four hundred dollars,
Banneker emerged from Mertoun's with his mentor.

"Gotta get home and dress for a rotten dinner," announced that gentleman
cheerfully. "Duck in here with me," he invited, indicating a sumptuous
bar, near the tailor's, "and get another little kick in the stomach. No?
Oh, verrawell. Where are you for?"

"The Public Library."

"Gawd!" said his companion, honestly shocked. "That's a gloomy hole,
ain't it?"

"Not so bad, when you get used to it. I've been putting in three hours a
day there lately."

"Whatever for?"

"Oh, browsing. Book-hungry, I suppose. Carnegie hasn't discovered
Manzanita yet, you know; so I haven't had many library opportunities."

"Speaking of Manzanita," remarked Cressey, and spoke of it,
reminiscently and at length, as they walked along together. "Did the
lovely and mysterious I.O.W. ever turn up and report herself?"

Banneker's breath caught painfully in his throat.

"D'you know who she was?" pursued the other, without pause for reply to
his previous question; and still without intermission continued: "Io
Welland. _That_'s who she was. Oh, but she's a hummer! I've met her
since. Married, you know. Quick work, that marriage. There was a dam'
queer story whispered around about her starting to elope with some other
chap, and his going nearly batty because she didn't turn up, and all the
time she was wandering around in the desert until somebody picked her up
and took care of her. You ought to know something of that. It was
supposed to be right in your back-yard."

"I?" said Banneker, commanding himself with an effort; "Miss Welland
reported in with a slight injury. That's all."

One glance at him told Cressey that Banneker did indeed "know something"
of the mysterious disappearance which had so exercised a legion of busy
tongues in New York; how much that something might be, he preserved for
future and private speculation, based on the astounding perception that
Banneker was in real pain of soul. Tact inspired Cressey to say at once:
"Of course, that's all you had to consider. By the way, you haven't seen
my revered uncle since you got here, have you?"

"Mr. Vanney? No."

"Better drop in on him."

"He might try to give me another yellow-back," smiled the ex-agent.

"Don't take Uncle Van for a fool. Once is plenty for him to be hit on
the nose."

"Has he still got a green whisker?"

"Go and see. He's asked about you two or three times in the last coupla
months."

"But I've no errand with him."

"How can you tell? He might start something for you. It isn't often that
he keeps a man in mind like he has you. Anyway, he's a wise old bird and
may hand you a pointer or two about what's what in New York. Shall I
'phone him you're in town?"

"Yes. I'll get in to see him some time to-morrow."

Having made an appointment, in the vital matter of shirts and shoes, for
the morning, they parted. Banneker set to his browsing in the library
until hunger drove him forth. After dinner he returned to his room,
cumbered with the accumulation of evening papers, for study.

Beyond the thin partition he could hear Miss Westlake moving about and
humming happily to herself. The sound struck dismay to his soul. The
prospect of work from him was doubtless the insecure foundation of that
cheerfulness. "Soon" he had said; the implication was that the matter
was pressing. Probably she was counting on it for the morrow. Well, he
must furnish something, anything, to feed the maw of her hungry
typewriter; to fulfill that wistful hope which had sprung in her eyes
when he spoke to her.

Sweeping his table bare of the lore and lure of journalism as typified
in the bulky, black-faced editions, he set out clean paper, cleansed his
fountain pen, and stared at the ceiling. What should he write about? His
mental retina teemed with impressions. But they were confused,
unresolved, distorted for all that he knew, since he lacked experience
and knowledge of the environment, and therefore perspective. Groping, he
recalled a saying of Gardner's as that wearied enthusiast descanted upon
the glories of past great names in metropolitan journalism.

"They used to say of Julian Ralph that he was always discovering City
Hall Park and getting excited over it; and when he got excited enough,
he wrote about it so that the public just ate it up."

Well, he, Banneker, hadn't discovered City Hall Park; not consciously.
But he had gleaned wonder and delight from other and more remote spots,
and now one of them began to stand forth upon the blank ceiling at which
he stared, seeking guidance. A crowded corner of Essex Street, stewing
in the hard sunshine. The teeming, shrill crowd. The stench and gleam of
a fish-stall offering bargains. The eager games of the children,
snatched between onsets of imminent peril as cart or truck came whirling
through and scattering the players. Finally the episode of the trade
fracas over the remains of a small and dubious weakfish, terminating
when the dissatisfied customer cast the delicacy at the head of the
stall-man and missed him, the _corpus delicti_ falling into the gutter
where it was at once appropriated and rapt away by an incredulous,
delighted, and mangy cat. A crude, commonplace, malodorous little street
row, the sort of thing that happens, in varying phases, on a dozen
East-Side corners seven days in the week.

Banneker approached and treated the matter from the viewpoint of the
cat, predatory, philosophic, ecstatic. One o'clock in the morning saw
the final revision, for he had become enthralled with the handling of
his subject. It was only a scant five pages; less than a thousand words.
But as he wrote and rewrote, other schemata rose to the surface of his
consciousness, and he made brief notes of them on random ends of paper;
half a dozen of them, one crowding upon another. Some day, perhaps, when
there were enough of them, when he had become known, had achieved the
distinction of a signature like Gardner, there might be a real
series.... His vague expectancies were dimmed in weariness.

Such was the genesis of the "Local Vagrancies" which later were to set
Park Row speculating upon the signature "Eban."




CHAPTER IV


Accessibility was one of Mr. Horace Vanney's fads. He aspired to be a
publicist, while sharing fallible humanity's ignorance of just what the
vague and imposing term signifies; and, as a publicist, he conceived it
in character to be readily available to the public. Almost anybody could
get to see Mr. Vanney in his tasteful and dignified lower Broadway
offices, upon almost any reasonable or plausible errand. Especially was
he hospitable to the newspaper world, the agents of publicity; and, such
is the ingratitude of the fallen soul of man, every newspaper office in
the city fully comprehended his attitude, made use of him as convenient,
and professionally regarded him as a bit of a joke, albeit a useful and
amiable joke. Of this he had no inkling. Enough for him that he was
frequently, even habitually quoted, upon a wide range of windy topics,
often with his picture appended.

With far less difficulty than he had found in winning the notice of Mr.
Gordon, Banneker attained the sanctum of the capitalist.

"Well, well!" was the important man's greeting as he shook hands. "Our
young friend from the desert! How do we find New York?"

From Banneker's reply, there grew out a pleasantly purposeless
conversation, which afforded the newcomer opportunity to decide that he
did not like this Mr. Vanney, sleek, smiling, gentle, and courteous, as
well as he had the brusque old tyrant of the wreck. That green-whiskered
autocrat had been at least natural, direct, and unselfish in his grim
emergency work. This manifestation seemed wary, cautious, on its guard
to defend itself against some probable tax upon its good nature. All
this unconscious, instinctive reckoning of the other man's
characteristics gave to the young fellow an effect of poise, of
judicious balance and quiet confidence. It was one of Banneker's
elements of strength, which subsequently won for him his unique place,
that he was always too much interested in estimating the man to whom he
was talking, to consider even what the other might think of him. It was
at once a form of egoism, and the total negation of egotism. It made him
the least self-conscious of human beings. And old Horace Vanney,
pompous, vain, the most self-conscious of his genus, felt, though he
could not analyze, the charm of it.

A chance word indicated that Banneker was already "placed." At once,
though almost insensibly, the attitude of Mr. Vanney eased; obviously
there was no fear of his being "boned" for a job. At the same time he
experienced a mild misgiving lest he might be forfeiting the services of
one who could be really useful to him. Banneker's energy and
decisiveness at the wreck had made a definite impression upon him. But
there was the matter of the rejected hundred-dollar tip. Unpliant,
evidently, this young fellow. Probably it was just as well that he
should be broken in to life and new standards elsewhere than in the
Vanney interests. Later, if he developed, watchfulness might show it to
be worth while to....

"What is it that you have in mind, my boy?" inquired the benign Mr.
Vanney.

"I start in on The Ledger next month."

"The Ledger! Indeed! I did not know that you had any journalistic
experience."

"I haven't."

"Well. Er--hum! Journalism, eh? A--er--brilliant profession!"

"You think well of it?"

"I have many friends among the journalists. Fine fellows! Very fine
fellows."

The instinctive tone of patronage was not lost upon Banneker. He felt
annoyed at Mr. Vanney. Unreasonably annoyed. "What's the matter with
journalism?" he asked bluntly.

"The matter?" Mr. Vanney was blandly surprised. "Haven't I just said--"

"Yes; you have. Would you let your son go into a newspaper office?"

"My son? My son chose the profession of law."

"But if he had wanted to be a journalist?"

"Journalism does not perhaps offer the same opportunities for personal
advancement as some other lines," said the financier cautiously.

"Why shouldn't it?"

"It is largely anonymous." Mr. Vanney gave the impression of feeling
carefully for his words. "One may go far in journalism and yet be
comparatively unknown to the public. Still, he might be of great
usefulness," added the sage, brightening, "very great usefulness. A
sound, conservative, self-respecting newspaper such as The Ledger, is a
public benefactor."

"And the editor of it?"

"That's right, my boy," approved the other. "Aim high! Aim high! The
great prizes in journalism are few. They are, in any line of endeavor.
And the apprenticeship is hard."

Herbert Cressey's clumsy but involuntary protest reasserted itself in
Banneker's mind. "I wish you would tell me frankly, Mr. Vanney, whether
reporting is considered undignified and that sort of thing?"

"Reporters can be a nuisance," replied Mr. Vanney fervently. "But they
can also be very useful."

"But on the whole--"

"On the whole it is a necessary apprenticeship. Very suitable for a
young man. Not a final career, in my judgment."

"A reporter on The Ledger, then, is nothing but a reporter on The
Ledger."

"Isn't that enough, for a start?" smiled the other. "The station-agent
at--what was the name of your station? Yes, Manzanita. The station-agent
at Manzanita--"

"Was E. Banneker," interposed the owner of that name positively. "A
small puddle, but the inhabitant was an individual toad, at least. To
keep one's individuality in New York isn't so easy, of course."

"There are quite a number of people in New York," pointed out the
philosopher, Vanney. "Mostly crowd."

"Yes," said Banneker. "You've told me something about the newspaper
business that I wanted to know." He rose.

The other put out an arresting hand. "Wouldn't you like to do a little
reporting for me, before you take up your regular work?"

"What kind of reporting?"

"Quite simple. A manufacturing concern in which I own a considerable
interest has a strike on its hands. Suppose you go down to Sippiac, New
Jersey, where our factories are, spend three or four days, and report
back to me your impressions and any ideas you may gather as to improving
our organization for furthering our interests."

"What makes you think that I could be useful in that line?" asked
Banneker curiously.

"My observations at the Manzanita wreck. You have, I believe, a knack
for handling a situation."

"I can always try," accepted Banneker.

Supplied with letters to the officials of the International Cloth
Company, and a liberal sum for expenses, the neophyte went to Sippiac.
There he visited the strongly guarded mills, still making a feeble
pretense of operating, talked with the harassed officials, the gang-boss
of the strike-breakers, the "private guards," who had, in fact,
practically assumed dominant police authority in the place; all of which
was faithful to the programme arranged by Mr. Vanney. Having done so
much, he undertook to obtain a view of the strike from the other side;
visited the wretched tenements of the laborers, sought out the sullen
and distrustful strike-leaders, heard much fiery oratory and some veiled
threats from impassioned agitators, mostly foreign and all tragically
earnest; chatted with corner grocerymen, saloon-keepers, ward
politicians, composing his mental picture of a strike in a minor city,
absolutely controlled, industrially, politically, and socially by the
industry which had made it. The town, as he came to conceive it, was a
fevered and struggling gnome, bound to a wheel which ground for others;
a gnome who, if he broke his bonds, would be perhaps only the worse for
his freedom. At the beginning of the sixth day, for his stay had
outgrown its original plan, the pocket-ledger, 3 T 9901, was but little
the richer, but the mind of its owner teemed with impressions.

It was his purpose to take those impressions in person to Mr. Horace
Vanney, by the 10 A.M. train. Arriving at the station early, he was
surprised at being held up momentarily by a line of guards engaged in
blocking off a mob of wailing, jabbering women, many of whom had
children in their arms, or at their skirts. He asked the ticket-agent, a
big, pasty young man about them.

"Mill workers," said the agent, making change.

"What are they after?"

"Wanta get to the 10.10 train."

"And the guards are stopping them?"

"You can use your eyes, cantcha?"

Using his eyes, Banneker considered the position. "Are those fellows on
railroad property?"

"What is it to you whether they are or ain't?"

Banneker explained his former occupation. "That's different," said the
agent. "Come inside. That's a hell of a mess, ain't it!" he added
plaintively as Banneker complied. "Some of those poor Hunkies have got
their tickets and can't use 'em."

"I'd see that they got their train, if this was my station," asserted
Banneker.

"Yes, you would! With that gang of strong-arms against you."

"Chase 'em," advised Banneker simply. "They've got no right keeping your
passengers off your trains."

"Chase 'em, ay? You'd do it, I suppose."

"I would."

"How?"

"You've got a gun, haven't you?"

"Maybe you think those guys haven't got guns, too."

"Well, all I can say is, that if there had been passengers held up from
their trains at my station and I didn't get them through, _I_'d have
been through so far as the Atkinson and St. Philip goes."

"This railroad's different. I'd be through if I butted in on this mill
row."

"How's that?"

"Well, for one thing, old Vanney, who's the real boss here, is a
director of the road."

"So _that_'s it!" Banneker digested this information. "Why are the women
so anxious to get away?"

"They say"--the local agent lowered his voice--"their children are
starving here, and they can get better jobs in other places. Naturally
the mills don't want to lose a lot of their hands, particularly the
women, because they're the cheapest. I don't know as I blame 'em for
that. But this business of hiring a bunch of ex-cons and--Hey! Where are
you goin'?"

Banneker was beyond the door before the query was completed. Looking out
of the window, the agent saw a fat and fussy young mother, who had
contrived to get through the line, waddling at her best speed across the
open toward the station, and dragging a small boy by the hand. A lank
giant from the guards' ranks was after her. Screaming, she turned the
corner out of his vision. There were sounds which suggested a row at the
station-door, but the agent, called at that moment to the wire, could
not investigate. The train came and went, and he saw nothing more of the
ex-railroader from the West.

Although Mr. Horace Vanney smiled pleasantly enough when Banneker
presented himself at the office to make his report, the nature of the
smile suggested a background more uncertain.

"Well, what have you found, my boy?" the financier began.

"A good many things that ought to be changed," answered Banneker
bluntly.

"Quite probably. No institution is perfect."

"The mills are pretty rotten. You pay your people too little--"

"Where do you get that idea?"

"From the way they live."

"My dear boy; if we paid them twice as much, they'd live the same way.
The surplus would go to the saloons."

"Then why not wipe out the saloons?"

"I am not the Common Council of Sippiac," returned Mr. Vanney dryly.

"Aren't you?" retorted Banneker even more dryly.

The other frowned. "What else?"

"Well; the housing. You own a good many of the tenements, don't you?"

"The company owns some."

"They're filthy holes."

"They are what the tenants make them."

"The tenants didn't build them with lightless hallways, did they?"

"They needn't live there if they don't like them. Have you spent all
your time, for which I am paying, nosing about like a cheap magazine
muckraker?" It was clear that Mr. Vanney was annoyed.

"I've been trying to find out what is wrong with Sippiac. I thought you
wanted facts."

"Precisely. Facts. Not sentimental gushings."

"Well, there are your guards. There isn't much sentiment about them. I
saw one of them smash a woman in the face, and knock her down, while she
was trying to catch a train and get out of town."

"And what did you do?"

"I don't know exactly how much. But I hope enough to land him in the
hospital. They pulled me off too soon."

"Do you know that you would have been killed if it hadn't been for some
of the factory staff who saved you from the other guards--as you
deserved, for your foolhardiness?"

The young man's eyebrows went up a bit. "Don't bank too much on my
foolhardiness. I had a wall back of me. And there would have been
material for several funerals before they got me." He touched his
hip-pocket. "By the way, you seem to be well informed."

"I've been in 'phone communication with Sippiac since the regrettable
occurrence. It perhaps didn't occur to you to find out that the woman,
who is now under arrest, bit the guard very severely."

"Of course! Just like the rabbit bit the bulldog. You've got a lot of
thugs and strong-arm men doing your dirty work, that ought to be in
jail. If the newspapers here ever get onto the situation, it would make
pretty rough reading for you, Mr. Vanney."

The magnate looked at him with contemptuous amusement. "No newspaper of
decent standing prints that kind of socialistic stuff, my young friend."

"Why not?"

"Why not! Because of my position. Because the International Cloth
Company is a powerful institution of the most reputable standing, with
many lines of influence."

"And that is enough to keep the newspapers from printing an article
about conditions in Sippiac?" asked Banneker, deeply interested in this
phase of the question. "Is that the fact?"

It was not the fact; The Sphere, for one, would have handled the strike
on the basis of news interest, as Mr. Vanney well knew; wherefore he
hated and pretended to despise The Sphere. But for his own purposes he
answered:

"Not a paper in New York would touch it. Except," he added negligently,
"perhaps some lying, Socialist sheet. And let me warn you, Mr.
Banneker," he pursued in his suavest tone, "that you will find no place
for your peculiar ideas on The Ledger. In fact, I doubt whether you will
be doing well either by them or by yourself in going on their staff,
holding such views as you do."

"Do you? Then I'll tell them beforehand."

Mr. Vanney privately reflected that there was no need of this: _he_
intended to call up the editor-in-chief and suggest the unsuitability of
the candidate for a place, however humble, on the staff of a highly
respectable and suitably respectful daily.

Which he did. The message was passed on to Mr. Gordon, and, in his large
and tolerant soul, decently interred. One thing of which the managing
editor of The Ledger was not tolerant was interference from without in
his department.

Before allowing his man to leave, Mr. Vanney read him a long and
well-meant homily, full of warning and wisdom, and was both annoyed and
disheartened when, at the end of it, Banneker remarked:

"I'll dare you to take a car and spend twenty-four hours going about
Sippiac with me. If you stand for your system after that, I'll pay for
the car."

To which the other replied sadly that Banneker had in some manner
acquired a false and distorted view of industrial relations.

Therein, for once in an existence guided almost exclusively by
prejudice, Horace Vanney was right. At the outset of a new career to
which he was attuning his mind, Banneker had been injected into a
situation typical of all that is worst in American industrial life, a
local manufacturing enterprise grown rich upon the labor of underpaid
foreigners, through the practice of all the vicious, lawless, and
insidious methods of an ingrown autocracy, and had believed it to be
fairly representative. Had not Horace Vanney, doubtless genuine in his
belief, told him as much?

"We're as fair and careful with our employees as any of our
competitors."

As a matter of fact there were, even then, scores of manufacturing
plants within easy distance of New York, representing broad and generous
policies and conducted on a progressive and humanistic labor system. Had
Banneker had his first insight into local industrial conditions through
one of these, he might readily have been prejudiced in favor of capital.
As it was, swallowing Vanney's statement as true, he mistook an evil
example as a fair indication of the general status. Then and there he
became a zealous protagonist of labor.

It had been Mr. Horace Vanney's shrewd design to show a budding
journalist of promise on which side his self-interest lay. The weak spot
in the plan was that Banneker did not seem to care!




CHAPTER V


Banneker's induction into journalism was unimpressive. They gave him a
desk, an outfit of writing materials, a mail-box with his name on it,
and eventually an assignment. Mr. Mallory presented him to several of
the other "cubs" and two or three of the older and more important
reporters. They were all quite amiable, obviously willing to be helpful,
and they impressed the observant neophyte with that quiet and solid
_esprit de corps_ which is based upon respect for work well performed in
a common cause. He apprehended that The Ledger office was in some sort
an institution.

None of his new acquaintances volunteered information as to the
mechanism of his new job. Apparently he was expected to figure that out
for himself. By nature reticent, and trained in an environment which
still retained enough of frontier etiquette to make a scrupulous
incuriosity the touchstone of good manners and perhaps the essence of
self-preservation, Banneker asked no questions. He sat and waited.

One by one the other reporters were summoned by name to the city desk,
and dispatched with a few brief words upon the various items of the
news. Presently Banneker found himself alone, in the long files of
desks. For an hour he sat there and for a second hour. It seemed a
curious way in which to be earning fifteen dollars a week. He wondered
whether he was expected to sit tight at his desk. Or had he the freedom
of the office? Characteristically choosing the more active assumption,
he found his way to the current newspaper files. They were like old
friends.

"Mr. Banneker." An office boy was at his elbow. "Mr. Greenough wants
you."

Conscious of a quickened pulse, and annoyed at himself because of it,
the tyro advanced to receive his maiden assignment. The epochal event
was embodied in the form of a small clipping from an evening paper,
stating that a six-year-old boy had been fatally burned at a bonfire
near the North River. Banneker, Mr. Greenough instructed him mildly, was
to make inquiries of the police, of the boy's family, of the hospital,
and of such witnesses as he could find.

Quick with interest he caught up his hat and hurried out. Death, in the
sparsely populated country wherefrom he hailed, was a matter of
inclusive local importance; he assumed the same of New York. Three
intense hours he devoted to an item which any police reporter of six
months' standing would have rounded up in a brace of formal inquiries,
and hastened back, brimful of details for Mr. Greenough.

"Good! Good!" interpolated that blandly approving gentleman from time to
time in the course of the narrative. "Write it, Mr. Banneker! write it."

"How much shall I write?"

"Just what is necessary to tell the news."

Behind the amiable smile which broadened without lighting up the
sub-Mongol physiognomy of the city editor, Banneker suspected something.
As he sat writing page after page, conscientiously setting forth every
germane fact, the recollection of that speculative, estimating smile
began to play over the sentences with a dire and blighting beam. Three
fourths of the way through, the writer rose, went to the file-board and
ran through a dozen newspapers. He was seeking a ratio, a perspective.
He wished to determine how much, in a news sense, the death of the son
of an obscure East-Side plasterer was worth. On his return he tore up
all that he had written, and substituted a curt paragraph, without
character or color, which he turned in. He had gauged the value of the
tragedy accurately, in the light of his study of news files.

Greenough showed the paragraph (which failed to appear at all in the
overcrowded paper of next morning) to Mr. Gordon.

"The new man doesn't start well," he remarked. "Too little imaginative
interest."

"Isn't it knowledge rather than lack of interest?" suggested the
managing editor.

"It may come to the same thing. If he knows too much to get really
interested, he'll be a dull reporter."

"I doubt whether you'll find him dull," smiled Mr. Gordon. "But he may
find his job dull. In that case, of course he'd better find another."

Indeed, that was the danger which, for weeks to follow, Banneker
skirted. Police news, petty and formal, made up his day's work. Had he
sought beneath the surface of it the underlying elements, and striven to
express these, his matter as it came to the desk, however slight the
technical news value might have been, would have afforded the watchful
copy-readers, trained to that special selectiveness as only The Ledger
could train its men, opportunity of judging what potentialities might
lurk beneath the crudities of the "cub." But Banneker was not crude. He
was careful. His sense of the relative importance of news, acquired by
those weeks of intensive analysis before applying for his job, was too
just to let him give free play to his pen. What was the use? The "story"
wasn't worth the space.

Nevertheless, 3 T 9901, which Banneker was already too cognoscent to
employ in his formal newsgathering (the notebook is anathema to the
metropolitan reporter), was filling up with odd bits, which were being
transferred, in the weary hours when the new man sat at his desk with
nothing to do, to paper in the form of sketches for Miss Westlake's
trustful and waiting typewriter. Nobody could say that Banneker was not
industrious. Among his fellow reporters he soon acquired the melancholy
reputation of one who was forever writing "special stuff," none of which
ever "landed." It was chiefly because of his industry and reliability,
rather than any fulfillment of the earlier promise of brilliant worth as
shown in the Sunday Sphere articles, that he got his first raise to
twenty dollars. It surprised rather than gratified him.

He went to Mr. Gordon about it. The managing editor was the kind of man
with whom it is easy to talk straight talk.

"What's the matter with me?" asked Banneker.

Mr. Gordon played a thoughtful tattoo upon his fleshy knuckles with the
letter-opener. "Nothing. Aren't you satisfied?"

"No. Are you?"

"You've had your raise, and fairly early. Unless you had been worth it,
you wouldn't have had it."

"Am I doing what you expected of me?"

"Not exactly. But you're developing into a sure, reliable reporter."

"A routine man," commented Banneker.

"After all, the routine man is the backbone of the office." Mr. Gordon
executed a fantasia on his thumb. "Would you care to try a desk job?" he
asked, peering at Banneker over his glasses.

"I'd rather run a trolley car. There's more life in it."

"Do you _see_ life, in your work, Mr. Banneker?"

"See it? I feel it. Sometimes I think it's going to flatten me out like
a steam-roller."

"Then why not write it?"

"It isn't news: not what I see."

"Perhaps not. Perhaps it's something else. But if it's there and we can
get a gleam of it into the paper, we'll crowd news out to make a place
for it. You haven't been reading The Ledger I'm afraid."

"Like a Bible."

"Not to good purpose, then. What do you think of Tommy Burt's stuff?"

"It's funny; some of it. But I couldn't do it to save my job."

"Nobody can do it but Burt, himself. Possibly you could learn something
from it, though."

"Burt doesn't like it, himself. He told me it was all formula; that you
could always get a laugh out of people about something they'd been
taught to consider funny, like a red nose or a smashed hat. He's got a
list of Sign Posts on the Road to Humor."

"The cynicism of twenty-eight," smiled the tolerant Mr. Gordon. "Don't
let yourself be inoculated."

"Mr. Gordon," said Banneker doggedly; "I'm not doing the kind of work I
expected to do here."

"You can hardly expect the star jobs until you've made yourself a star
man."

Banneker flushed. "I'm not complaining of the way I've been treated.
I've had a square enough deal. The trouble is with me. I want to know
whether I ought to stick or quit."

"If you quit, what would you do?"

"I haven't a notion," replied the other with an indifference which
testified to a superb, instinctive self-confidence. "Something."

"Do it here. I think you'll come along all right."

"But what's wrong with me?" persisted Banneker.

"Too much restraint. A rare fault. You haven't let yourself out." For a
space he drummed and mused. Suddenly a knuckle cracked loudly. Mr.
Gordon flinched and glared at it, startled as if it had offended him by
interrupting a train of thought. "Here!" said he brusquely. "There's a
Sewer-Cleaners' Association picnic to-morrow. They're going to put in
half their day inspecting the Stimson Tunnel under the North River.
Pretty idea; isn't it? Suppose I ask Mr. Greenough to send you out on
the story. And I'd like a look at it when you turn it in."

Banneker worked hard on his report of the picnic; hard and
self-consciously. Tommy Burt would, he knew, have made a "scream" of it,
for tired business men to chuckle over on their way downtown. Pursuant
to what he believed Mr. Gordon wanted, Banneker strove conscientiously
to be funny with these human moles, who, having twelve hours of freedom
for sunshine and air, elected to spend half of it in a hole bigger,
deeper, and more oppressive than any to which their noisome job called
them. The result was five painfully mangled sheets which presently went
to the floor, torn in strips. After that Banneker reported the picnic as
he saw, felt, and smelt it. It was a somber bit of writing, not without
its subtleties and shrewd perceptions; quite unsuitable to the columns
of The Ledger, in which it failed to appear. But Mr. Gordon read it
twice. He advised Banneker not to be discouraged.

Banneker was deeply discouraged. He wanted to resign.

Perhaps he would nave resigned, if old Mynderse Verschoyle had not died
at eight o'clock on the morning of the day when Banneker was the
earliest man to report at the office. A picturesque character, old
Mynderse, who had lived for forty-five years with his childless wife in
the ancient house on West 10th Street, and for the final fifteen years
had not addressed so much as a word to her. She had died three months
before; and now he had followed, apparently, from what Banneker learned
in an interview with the upset and therefore voluble secretary of the
dead man, because, having no hatred left on which to center his life, he
had nothing else to live for. Banneker wrote the story of that hatred,
rigid, ceremonious, cherished like a rare virtue until it filled two
lives; and he threw about it the atmosphere of the drear and divided old
house. At the end, the sound of the laughter of children at play in the
street.

The article appeared word for word as he had written it. That noon Tommy
Burt, the funny man, drawing down his hundred-plus a week on space, came
over and sat on Banneker's desk, and swung his legs and looked at him
mournfully and said:

"You've broken through your shell at last."

"Did you like it?" asked Banneker.

"Like it! My God, if I could write like that! But what's the use! Never
in the world."

"Oh, that's nonsense," returned Banneker, pleased. "Of course you can.
But what's the rest of your 'if'?"

"I wouldn't be wasting my time here. The magazines for me."

"Is that better?"

"Depends on what you're after. For a man who wants to write, it's
better, of course."

"Why?"

"Gives him a larger audience. No newspaper story is remembered overnight
except by newspaper men. And they don't matter."

"Why don't they matter?" Banneker was surprised again, this time rather
disagreeably.

"It's a little world. There isn't much substance to it. Take that
Verschoyle stuff of yours; that's literature, that is! But you'll never
hear of it again after next week. A few people here will remember it,
and it'll help you to your next raise. But after you've got that, and,
after that, your lift onto space, where are you?"

The abruptly confidential approach of Tommy Burt flattered Banneker with
the sense that by that one achievement of the Verschoyle story he had
attained a new status in the office. Later there came out from the inner
sanctum where sat the Big Chief, distilling venom and wit in equal parts
for the editorial page, a special word of approval. But this pleased the
recipient less than the praise of his peers in the city room.

After that first talk, Burt came back to Banneker's desk from time to
time, and once took him to dinner at "Katie's," the little German
restaurant around the corner. Burt was given over to a restless and
inoffensively egoistic pessimism.

"Look at me. I'm twenty-eight and making a good income. When I was
twenty-three, I was making nearly as much. When I'm thirty-eight, where
shall I be?"

"Can't you keep on making it?" asked Banneker.

"Doubtful. A fellow goes stale on the kind of stuff I do. And if I do
keep on? Five to six thousand is fine now. It won't be so much ten years
from now. That's the hell of this game; there's no real chance in it."

"What about the editing jobs?"

"Desk-work? Chain yourself by the leg, with a blue pencil in your hand
to butcher better men's stuff? A managing editor, now, I'll grant you.
He gets his twenty or twenty-five thousand if he doesn't die of
overstrain, first. But there's only a few managing editors."

"There are more editorial writers."

"Hired pens. Dishing up other fellows' policies, whether you believe in
'em or not. No; I'm not of that profession, anyway." He specified the
profession, a highly ancient and dishonorable one. Mr. Burt, in his gray
moods, was neither discriminating nor quite just.

Banneker voiced the question which, at some point in his progress, every
thoughtful follower of journalism must meet and solve as best he can.
"When a man goes on a newspaper I suppose he more or less accepts that
paper's standards, doesn't he?"

"More or less? To what extent?" countered the expert.

"I haven't figured that out, yet."

"Don't be in a hurry about it," advised the other with a gleam of
malice. "The fellows that do figure it out to the end, and are honest
enough about it, usually quit."

"You haven't quit."

"Perhaps I'm not honest enough or perhaps I'm too cowardly," retorted
the gloomy Burt.

Banneker smiled. Though the other was nearly two years his senior, he
felt immeasurably the elder. There is about the true reporter type an
infinitely youthful quality; attractive and touching; the eternal
juvenile, which, being once outgrown with its facile and evanescent
enthusiasms, leaves the expert declining into the hack. Beside this
prematurely weary example of a swift and precarious success, Banneker
was mature of character and standard. Nevertheless, the seasoned
journalist was steeped in knowledge which the tyro craved.

"What would you do," Banneker asked, "if you were sent out to write a
story absolutely opposed to something you believed right; political, for
instance?"

"I don't write politics. That's a specialty."

"Who does?"

"'Parson' Gale."

"Does he believe in everything The Ledger stands for?"

"Certainly. In office hours. For and in consideration of one hundred and
twenty-five dollars weekly, duly and regularly paid."

"Outside of office hours, then."

"Ah; that's different. In Harlem where he lives, the Parson is quite a
figure among the reform Democrats. The Ledger, as you know, is
Republican; and anything in the way of reform is its favorite butt. So
Gale spends his working day poking fun at his political friends and
associates."

"Out West we'd call that kind of fellow a yellow pup."

"Well, don't call the Parson that; not to me," warned the other
indignantly. "He's as square a man as you'll find on Park Row. Why, you
were just saying, yourself, that a reporter is bound to accept his
paper's standards when he takes the job."

"Then I suppose the answer is that a man ought to work only on a
newspaper in whose policies he believes."

"Which policies? A newspaper has a hundred different ones about a
hundred different things. Here in this office we're dead against the
split infinitive and the Honest Laboring Man. We don't believe he's
honest and we've got our grave doubts as to his laboring. Yet one of our
editorial writers is an out-and-out Socialist and makes fiery speeches
advising the proletariat to rise and grab the reins of government. But
he'd rather split his own head than an infinitive."

"Does he write anti-labor editorials?" asked the bewildered Banneker.

"Not as bad as that. He confines himself to European politics and
popular scientific matters. But, of course, wherever there is necessity
for an expression of opinion, he's anti-socialist in his writing, as
he's bound to be."

"Just a moment ago you were talking of hired pens. Now you seem to be
defending that sort of thing. I don't understand your point of view."

"Don't you? Neither do I, I guess," admitted the expositor with great
candor. "I can argue it either way and convince myself, so far as the
other fellow's work is concerned. But not for my own."

"How do you figure it out for yourself, then?"

"I don't. I dodge. It's a kind of tacit arrangement between the desk and
me. In minor matters I go with the paper. That's easy, because I agree
with it in most questions of taste and the way of doing things. After
all The Ledger _has_ got certain standards of professional conduct and
of decent manners; it's a gentleman's paper. The other things, the
things where my beliefs conflict with the paper's standards, political
or ethical, don't come my way. You see, I'm a specialist; I do mostly
the fluffy stuff."

"If that's the way to keep out of embarrassing decisions, I'd like to
become a specialist myself."

"You can do it, all right," the other assured him earnestly. "That story
of yours shows it. You've got The Ledger touch--no, it's more individual
than that. But you've got something that's going to stick out even here.
Just the same, there'll come a time when you'll have to face the other
issue of your job or your--well, your conscience."

What Tommy Burt did not say in continuation, and had no need to say,
since his expressive and ingenuous face said it for him, was, "And I
wonder what you'll do with _that_!"

A far more influential friend than Tommy Burt had been wondering, too,
and had, not without difficulty, expressed her doubts in writing.
Camilla Van Arsdale had written to Banneker:

... I know so little of journalism, but there are things about it that I
distrust instinctively. Do you remember what that wrangler from the _Jon
Cal_ told Old Bill Speed when Bill wanted to hire him: "I wouldn't take
any job that I couldn't look in the eye and tell it to go to hell on
five minutes' notice." I have a notion that you've got to take that
attitude toward a reporting job. There must be so much that a man cannot
do without loss of self-respect. Yet, I can't imagine why I should worry
about you as to that. Unless it is that, in a strange environment one
gets one's values confused.... Have you had to do any "Society"
reporting yet? I hope not. The society reporters of my day were either
obsequious little flunkeys and parasites, or women of good connections
but no money who capitalized their acquaintanceship to make a poor
living, and whom one was sorry for, but would rather not see. Going to
places where one is not asked, scavenging for bits of news from butlers
and housekeepers, sniffing after scandals--perhaps that is part of the
necessary apprenticeship of newspaper work. But it's not a proper work
for a gentleman. And, in any case, Ban, you are that, by the grace of
your ancestral gods.

Little enough did Banneker care for his ancestral gods: but he did
greatly care for the maintenance of those standards which seemed to have
grown, indigenously within him, since he had never consciously
formulated them. As for reporting, of whatever kind, he deemed Miss Van
Arsdale prejudiced. Furthermore, he had met the society reporter of The
Ledger, an elderly, mild, inoffensive man, neat and industrious, and
discerned in him no stigma of the lickspittle. Nevertheless, he hoped
that he would not be assigned to such "society news" as Remington did
not cover in his routine. It might, he conceived, lead him into false
situations where he could be painfully snubbed. And he had never yet
been in a position where any one could snub him without instant
reprisals. In such circumstances he did not know exactly what he would
do. However, that bridge could be crossed or refused when he came to it.




CHAPTER VI


Such members of the Brashear household as chose to accommodate
themselves strictly to the hour could have eight o'clock breakfast in
the basement dining-room for the modest consideration of thirty cents;
thirty-five with special cream-jug. At these gatherings, usually
attended by half a dozen of the lodgers, matters of local interest were
weightily discussed; such as the progress of the subway excavations, the
establishment of a new Italian restaurant in 11th Street, or the calling
away of the fourth-floor-rear by the death of an uncle who would perhaps
leave him money. To this sedate assemblage descended one crisp December
morning young Wickert, clad in the natty outline of a new Bernholz suit,
and obviously swollen with tidings.

"Whaddya know about the latest?" he flung forth upon the coffee-scented
air.

"The latest" in young Wickert's compendium of speech might be the
garments adorning his trim person, the current song-hit of a vaudeville
to which he had recently contributed his critical attention, or some
tidbit of purely local gossip. Hainer, the plump and elderly accountant,
opined that Wickert had received an augmentation of salary, and got an
austere frown for his sally. Evidently Wickert deemed his news to be of
special import; he was quite bloated, conversationally. He now dallied
with it.

"Since when have you been taking in disguised millionaires, Mrs.
Brashear?"

The presiding genius of the house, divided between professional
resentment at even so remotely slurring an implication (for was not the
Grove Street house good enough for any millionaire, undisguised!) and
human curiosity, requested an explanation.

"I was in Sherry's restaurant last night," said the offhand Wickert.

"I didn't read about any fire there," said the jocose Hainer, pointing
his sally with a wink at Lambert, the art-student.

Wickert ignored the gibe. Such was the greatness of his tidings that he
could afford to.

"Our firm was giving a banquet to some buyers and big folks in the
trade. Private room upstairs; music, flowers, champagne by the case. We
do things in style when we do 'em. They sent me up after hours with an
important message to our Mr. Webler; he was in charge of arrangements."

"Been promoted to be messenger, ay?" put in Mr. Hainer, chuckling.

"When I came downstairs," continued the other with only a venomous
glance toward the seat of the scorner, "I thought to myself what's the
matter with taking a look at the swells feeding in the big restaurant.
You may not know it, people, but Sherry's is the ree-churchiest place in
Nuh Yawk to eat dinner. It's got 'em all beat. So I stopped at the door
and took 'em in. Swell? Oh, you dolls! I stood there trying to work up
the nerve to go in and siddown and order a plate of stew or something
that wouldn't stick me more'n a dollar, just to _say_ I'd been dining at
Sherry's, when I looked across the room, and whadda you think?" He
paused, leaned forward, and shot out the climactic word, "Banneker!"

"Having his dinner there?" asked the incredulous but fascinated Mrs.
Brashear.

"Like he owned the place. Table to himself, against the wall. Waiter
fussin' over him like he loved him. And dressed! Oh, Gee!"

"Did you speak to him?" asked Lambert.

"He spoke to me," answered Wickert, dealing in subtle distinctions. "He
was just finishing his coffee when I sighted him. Gave the waiter haffa
dollar. I could see it on the plate. There I was at the door, and he
said, 'Why, hello, Wickert. Come and have a liquor.' He pronounced it a
queer, Frenchy way. So I said thanks, I'd have a highball."

"Didn't he seem surprised to see you there?" asked Hainer.

Wickert paid an unconscious tribute to good-breeding. "Banneker's the
kind of feller that wouldn't show it if he was surprised. He couldn't
have been as surprised as I was, at that. We went to the bar and had a
drink, and then I ast him what'd _he_, have on _me_, and all the time I
was sizing him up. I'm telling you, he looked like he'd grown up in
Sherry's."

The rest of the conversation, it appeared from Mr. Wickert's spirited
sketch, had consisted mainly in eager queries from himself, and
good-humored replies by the other.

Did Banneker eat there every night?

Oh, no! He wasn't up to that much of a strain on his finances.

But the waiters seemed to know him, as if he was one of the regulars.

In a sense he was. Every Monday he dined there. Monday was his day off.

Well, Mr. Wickert (awed and groping) _would_ be damned! All alone?

Banneker, smiling, admitted the solitude. He rather liked dining alone.

Oh, Wickert couldn't see that at all! Give him a pal and a coupla lively
girls, say from the Ladies' Tailor-Made Department, good-lookers and
real dressers; that was _his_ idea of a dinner, though he'd never tried
it at Sherry's. Not that he couldn't if he felt like it. How much did
they stick you for a good feed-out with a cocktail and maybe a bottle of
Italian Red?

Well, of course, that depended on which way was Wickert going? Could
Banneker set him on his way? He was taking a taxi to the Avon Theater,
where there was an opening.

Did Mr. Banneker (Wickert had by this time attained the "Mr." stage)
always follow up his dinner at Sherry's with a theater?

Usually, if there were an opening. If not he went to the opera or a
concert.

For his part, Wickert liked a little more spice in life. Still, every
feller to his tastes. And Mr. Banneker was sure dressed for the part.
Say--if he didn't mind--who made that full-dress suit?

No; of course he didn't mind. Mertoun made it.

After which Mr. Banneker had been deftly enshrouded in a fur-lined coat,
worthy of a bank president, had crowned these glories with an impeccable
silk hat, and had set forth. Wickert had only to add that he wore in his
coat lapel one of those fancy tuberoses, which he, Wickert, had gone to
the pains of pricing at the nearest flower shop immediately after
leaving Banneker. A dollar apiece! No, he had not accepted the offer of
a lift, being doubtful upon the point of honor as to whether he would be
expected to pay a _pro rata_ of the taxi charge. They, the assembled
breakfast company, had his permission to call him, Mr. Wickert, a goat
if Mr. Banneker wasn't the swellest-looking guy he had anywhere seen on
that memorable evening.

Nobody called Mr. Wickert a goat. But Mr. Hainer sniffed and said:

"And him a twenty-five-dollar-a-week reporter!"

"Perhaps he has private means," suggested little Miss Westlake, who had
her own reasons for suspecting this: reasons bolstered by many and
frequent manuscripts, turned over to her for typing, recast, returned
for retyping, and again, in many instances, re-recast and re-retyped,
the result of the sweating process being advantageous to their literary
quality. Simultaneous advantage had accrued to the typist, also, in a
practical way. Though the total of her bills was modest, it constituted
an important extra; and Miss Westlake no longer sought to find solace
for her woes through the prescription of the ambulant school of
philosophic thought, and to solve her dental difficulties by walking the
floor of nights. Philosophy never yet cured a toothache. Happily the
sufferer was now able to pay a dentist. Hence Banneker could work,
untroubled of her painful footsteps in the adjoining room, and
considered the outcome cheap at the price. He deemed himself an exponent
of enlightened selfishness. Perhaps he was. But the dim and worn
spinster would have given half a dozen of her best and painless teeth to
be of service to him. Now she came to his defense with a pretty dignity:

"I am sure that Mr. Banneker would not be out of place in any company."

"Maybe not," answered the cynical Lambert. "But where does he get it? I
ask you!"

"Wherever he gets it, no gentleman could be more forehanded in his
obligations," declared Mrs. Brashear.

"But what's he want to blow it for in a shirty place like Sherry's?"
marveled young Wickert.

"Wyncha ask him?" brutally demanded Hainer.

Wickert examined his mind hastily, and was fain to admit inwardly that
he had wanted to ask him, but somehow felt "skittish" about it.
Outwardly he retorted, being displeased at his own weakness, "Ask him
yourself."

Had any one questioned the subject of the discussion at Mrs. Brashear's
on this point, even if he were willing to reply to impertinent
interrogations (a high improbability of which even the hardy Wickert
seems to have had some timely premonition), he would perhaps have
explained the glorified routine of his day-off, by saying that he went
to Sherry's and the opening nights for the same reason that he prowled
about the water-front and ate in polyglot restaurants on obscure
street-corners east of Tompkins Square; to observe men and women and the
manner of their lives. It would not have been a sufficient answer;
Banneker must have admitted that to himself. Too much a man of the world
in many strata not to be adjustable to any of them, nevertheless he felt
more attuned to and at one with his environment amidst the suave
formalism of Sherry's than in the more uneasy and precarious elegancies
of an East-Side Tammany Association promenade and ball.

Some of the youngsters of The Ledger said that he was climbing.

He was not climbing. To climb one must be conscious of an ascent to be
surmounted. Banneker was serenely unaware of anything above him, in that
sense. Eminent psychiatrists were, about that time, working upon the
beginning of a theory of the soul, later to be imposed upon an
impressionable and faddish world, which dealt with a profound psychical
deficit known as a "complex of inferiority." In Banneker they would have
found sterile soil. He had no complex of inferiority, nor, for that
matter, of superiority; mental attitudes which, applied to social
status, breed respectively the toady and the snob. He had no complex at
all. He had, or would have had, if the soul-analysts had invented such a
thing, a simplex. Relative status was a matter to which he gave little
thought. He maintained personal standards not because of what others
might think of him, but because he chose to think well of himself.

Sherry's and a fifth-row-center seat at opening nights meant to him
something more than refreshment and amusement; they were an assertion of
his right to certain things, a right of which, whether others recognized
or ignored it, he felt absolutely assured. These were the readily
attainable places where successful people resorted. Serenely determined
upon success, he felt himself in place amidst the outward and visible
symbols of it. Let the price be high for his modest means; this was an
investment which he could not afford to defer. He was but anticipating
his position a little, and in such wise that nobody could take exception
to it, because his self-promotion demanded no aid or favor from any
other living person. His interest was in the environment, not in the
people, as such, who were hardly more than, "walking ladies and
gentlemen" in a _mise-en-sc;ne_. Indeed, where minor opportunities
offered by chance of making acquaintances, he coolly rejected them.
Banneker did not desire to know people--yet. When he should arrive at
the point of knowing them, it must be upon his terms, not theirs.

It was on one of his Monday evenings of splendor that a misadventure of
the sort which he had long foreboded, befell him. Sherry's was crowded,
and a few tables away Banneker caught sight of Herbert Cressey, dining
with a mixed party of a dozen. Presently Cressey came over.

"What have you been doing with yourself?" he asked, shaking hands.
"Haven't seen you for months."

"Working," replied Banneker. "Sit down and have a cocktail. Two, Jules,"
he added to the attentive waiter.

"I guess they can spare me for five minutes," agreed Cressey, glancing
back at his forsaken place. "This isn't what you call work, though, is
it?"

"Hardly. This is my day off."

"Oh! And how goes the job?"

"Well enough."

"I'd think so," commented the other, taking in the general effect of
Banneker's easy habituation to the standards of the restaurant. "You
don't own this place, do you?" he added.

From another member of the world which had inherited or captured
Sherry's as part of the spoils of life, the question might have been
offensive. But Banneker genuinely liked Cressey.

"Not exactly," he returned lightly. "Do I give that unfortunate
impression?"

"You give very much the impression of owning old Jules--or he does--and
having a proprietary share in the new head waiter. Are you here much?"

"Monday evenings, only."

"This is a good cocktail," observed Cressey, savoring it expertly.
"Better than they serve to me. And, say, Banneker, did Mertoun make you
that outfit?"

"Yes."

"Then I quit him," declared the gilded youth.

"Why? Isn't it all right?"

"All right! Dammit, it's a better job than ever I got out of him,"
returned his companion indignantly. "Some change from the catalogue suit
you sported when you landed here! You know how to wear 'em; I've got to
say that for you.... I've got to get back. When'll you dine with me? I
want to hear all about it."

"Any Monday," answered Banneker.

Cressey returned to his waiting potage, and was immediately bombarded
with queries, mainly from the girl on his left.

"Who's the wonderful-looking foreigner?"

"He isn't a foreigner. At least not very much."

"He looks like a North Italian princeling I used to know," said one of
the women. "One of that warm-complexioned out-of-door type, that
preserves the Roman mould. Isn't he an Italian?"

"He's an American. I ran across him out in the desert country."

"Hence that burned-in brown. What was he doing out there?"

Cressey hesitated. Innocent of any taint of snobbery himself, he yet did
not know whether Banneker would care to have his humble position tacked
onto the tails of that work of art, his new coat. "He was in the
railroad business," he returned cautiously. "His name is Banneker."

"I've been seeing him for months," remarked another of the company.
"He's always alone and always at that table. Nobody knows him. He's a
mystery."

"He's a beauty," said Cressey's left-hand neighbor.

Miss Esther Forbes had been quite openly staring, with her large, gray,
and childlike eyes, at Banneker, eating his oysters in peaceful
unconsciousness of being made a subject for discussion. Miss Forbes was
a Greuze portrait come to life and adjusted to the extremes of fashion.
Behind an expression of the sweetest candor and wistfulness, as behind a
safe bulwark, she preserved an effrontery which balked at no defiance of
conventions in public, though essentially she was quite sufficiently
discreet for self-preservation. Also she had a keen little brain, a
reckless but good-humored heart and a memory retentive of important
trifles.

"In the West, Bertie?" she inquired of Cressey. "You were in that big
wreck there, weren't you?"

"Devil of a wreck," said Cressey uneasily. You never could tell what
Esther might know or might not say.

"Ask him over here," directed that young lady blandly, "for coffee and
liqueurs."

"Oh, I say!" protested one of the men. "Nobody knows anything about
him--"

"He's a friend of mine," put in Cressey, in a tone which ended that
particular objection. "But I don't think he'd come."

Instantly there was a chorus of demand for him.

"All right, I'll try," yielded Cressey, rising.

"Put him next to me," directed Miss Forbes.

The emissary visited Banneker's table, was observed to be in brief
colloquy with him, and returned, alone.

"Wouldn't he come?" interrogated the chorus.

"He's awfully sorry, but he says he isn't fit for decent human
associations."

"More and more interesting!"--"Why?"--"What awful thing has he been
doing?"

"Eating onions," answered Cressey. "Raw."

"I don't believe it," cried the indignant Miss Forbes. "One doesn't eat
raw onions at Sherry's. It's a subterfuge."

"Very likely."

"If I went over there myself, who'll bet a dozen silk stockings that I
can't--"

"Come off it, Ess," protested her brother-in-law across the table.
"That's too high a jump, even for you."

She let herself be dissuaded, but her dovelike eyes were vagrant during
the rest of the dinner.

Pleasantly musing over the last glass of a good but moderate-priced
Rosemont-Geneste, Banneker became aware of Cressey's dinner party filing
past him: then of Jules, the waiter, discreetly murmuring something,
from across the table. A faint and provocative scent came to his
nostrils, and as he followed Jules's eyes he saw a feminine figure
standing at his elbow. He rose promptly and looked down into a face
which might have been modeled for a type of appealing innocence.

"You're Mr. Banneker, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"I'm Esther Forbes, and I think I've heard a great deal about you."

"It doesn't seem probable," he replied gravely.

"From a cousin of mine," pursued the girl. "She was Io Welland. Haven't
I?"

A shock went through Banneker at the mention of the name. But he
steadied himself to say: "I don't think so."

Herein he was speaking by the letter. Knowing Io Welland as he had, he
deemed it very improbable that she had even so much as mentioned him to
any of her friends. In that measure, at least, he believed, she would
have respected the memory of the romance which she had so ruthlessly
blasted. This girl, with the daring and wistful eyes, was simply
fishing, so he guessed.

His guess was correct. Mendacity was not outside of Miss Forbes's easy
code when enlisted in a good cause, such as appeasing her own impish
curiosity. Never had Io so much as mentioned that quaint and lively
romance with which vague gossip had credited her, after her return from
the West; Esther Forbes had gathered it in, gossamer thread by gossamer
thread, and was now hoping to identify Banneker in its uncertain
pattern. Her little plan of startling him into some betrayal had proven
abortive. Not by so much as the quiver of a muscle or the minutest
shifting of an eye had he given sign. Still convinced that he was the
mysterious knight of the desert, she was moved to admiration for his
self-command and to a sub-thrill of pleasurable fear as before an
unknown and formidable species. The man who had transformed
self-controlled and invincible Io Welland into the creature of moods and
nerves and revulsions which she had been for the fortnight preceding her
marriage, must be something out of the ordinary. Instinct of womankind
told Miss Forbes that this and no other was the type of man to work such
a miracle.

"But you did know Io?" she persisted, feeling, as she afterward
confessed, that she was putting her head into the mouth of a lion
concerning whose habits her knowledge was regrettably insufficient.

The lion did not bite her head off. He did not even roar. He merely
said, "Yes."

"In a railroad wreck or something of that sort?"

"Something of that sort."

"Are you awfully bored and wishing I'd go away and let you alone?" she
said, on a note that pleaded for forbearance. "Because if you are, don't
make such heroic efforts to conceal it."

At this an almost imperceptible twist at the corners of his lips
manifested itself to the watchful eye and cheered the enterprising soul
of Miss Forbes. "No," he said equably, "I'm interested to discover how
far you'll go."

The snub left Miss Forbes unembarrassed.

"Oh, as far as you'll let me," she answered. "Did you ride in from your
ranch and drag Io out of the tangled wreckage at the end of your lasso?"

"My ranch? I wasn't on a ranch."

"Please, sir," she smiled up at him like a beseeching angel, "what did
you do that kept us all talking and speculating about you for a whole
week, though we didn't know your name?"

"I sat right on my job as station-agent at Manzanita and made up lists
of the killed and injured," answered Banneker dryly.

"Station-agent!" The girl was taken aback, for this was not at all in
consonance with the Io myth as it had drifted back, from sources never
determined, to New York. "Were you the station-agent?"

"I was."

She bestowed a glance at once appraising and flattering, less upon
himself than upon his apparel. "And what are you now? President of the
road?"

"A reporter on The Ledger."

"Really!" This seemed to astonish her even more than the previous
information. "What are you reporting here?"

"I'm off duty to-night."

"I see. Could you get off duty some afternoon and come to tea, if I'll
promise to have Io there to meet you?"

"Your party seems to be making signals of distress, Miss Forbes."

"That's the normal attitude of my friends and family toward me. You'll
come, won't you, Mr. Banneker?"

"Thank you: but reporting keeps one rather too busy for amusement."

"You won't come," she murmured, aggrieved. "Then it _is_ true about you
and Io."

This time she achieved a result. Banneker flushed angrily, though he
said, coolly enough: "I think perhaps you would make an enterprising
reporter, yourself, Miss Forbes."

"I'm sure I should. Well, I'll apologize. And if you won't come for
Io--she's still abroad, by the way and won't be back for a
month--perhaps you'll come for me. Just to show that you forgive my
impertinences. Everybody does. I'm going to tell Bertie Cressey he must
bring you.... All right, Bertie! I wish you wouldn't follow me up
like--like a paper-chase. Good-night, Mr. Banneker."

To her indignant escort she declared that it couldn't have hurt them to
wait a jiffy; that she had had a most amusing conversation; that Mr.
Banneker was as charming as he was good to look at; and that (in answer
to sundry questions) she had found out little or nothing, though she
hoped for better results in future.

"But he's Io's passion-in-the-desert right enough," said the irreverent
Miss Forbes.

Banneker sat long over his cooling coffee. Through haunted nights he had
fought maddening memories of Io's shadowed eyes, of the exhalant,
irresistible femininity of her, of the pulses of her heart against his
on that wild and wonderful night in the flood; and he had won to an
armed peace, in which the outposts of his spirit were ever on guard
against the recurrent thoughts of her.

Now, at the bitter music of her name on the lips of a gossiping and
frivolous girl, the barriers had given away. In eagerness and
self-contempt he surrendered to the vision. Go to an afternoon tea to
see and speak with her again? He would, in that awakened mood, have
walked across the continent, only to be in her presence, to feel himself
once more within the radius of that inexorable charm.




CHAPTER VII