The editor was sitting far back in his chair again, chewing absently on the extinct cigar.
"Kent, did you fuf-figure all that out by yourself?"
"No," said Kent, briefly. "There is a keener mind than mine behind it—and behind this oil field business, as well."
"I'd like to give that mind a stunt on the Argus," said the editor. "But about the Belmount mix-up: you will give us a stickful now and then as we go along, if you unearth anything that the public would like to read?"
"Certainly; any and everything that won't tend to interfere with my little intermediate scheme. As I have intimated, I must bring Bucks to terms on my own account before I turn him over to you and the people of the State. But I mean to be in on that, too."
Hildreth wagged his head dubiously.
"I may be overcautious; and I don't want to seem to scare you out, Kent. You ought to know your man better than I do—better than any of us; but if I had your job, I believe I should want to travel with a body-guard. I do, for a fact."
David Kent's laugh came easily. Fear, the fear of man, was not among his weaknesses.
"I am taking all the chances," he said; and so the conference ended.
Two days later the "educational" campaign was opened by an editorial in the Argus setting forth some hitherto unpublished matter concerning the manner in which the Trans-Western had been placed in the hands of a receiver. In its next issue the paper named the receivership after its true author, showing by a list of the officials that the road under Major Guilford had been made a hospital for Bucks politicians, and hinting pointedly that it was to be wrecked for the benefit of a stock-jobbing syndicate of eastern capitalists.