"Smith's a beaut," he said, shaking his head reminiscently. "I don't believe anything ever got away from him since he was big enough to sit in front of a desk. When I told him that you fellows had gone back to New York, he never batted an eye. He just pulled a telescope out of the bottom drawer of his desk and went up to the roof. In two minutes he was down again. 'Charles,' he said in that quiet biting way of his, 'God may have put bigger fools than you into this world, but in his great mercy he has not sent them to retard the work of the Gazette. The yacht lies precisely where she has lain for these two days. Will it be quite convenient for you to drop down there and have a talk, or do you design to wait until the gentlemen call at your desk and beg the privilege of telling you all?'"
He laughed again, this time without a trace of resentment; and so merry and spontaneous was this laugh that Varney could not help joining in.
"I suppose old Smith can tell you to go-to-hell more politely, yet more thoroughly, than any man that ever lived. I ran—and I was just in time at that, hey? Well, when you fellows steamed off, I kind of suspected that you weren't going very far. So I got a boy and had him trail you down the old River road on a wheel. By the time he got back and told me that I had sized it up about right, I had my plans arranged and my make-up all ready. That make-up was rather neat, I thought, what? Meantime, a long wire had come in from the Daily office, which made me keener than ever to see you. So I hired another wheel, ran on down, borrowed a canoe from a man I know here, and I guess you know the rest."
"I should say I did," said Varney. "Ha, ha! I should rather say I did."
One reason why it was so advantageous to make the boy talk was that it gave one a chance to think. All the time that he had listened so pleasantly to this garrulous chatter, Varney had been swiftly planning. Now he had the situation pretty well analyzed and saw all the ways that there were.
He might send the reporter away convinced that there was nothing in this new theory, after all, that the Gazette's trump card in fighting Maginnis and Reform was still his own unhappy resemblance to the outlawed author. Or he might send him off with enough of a new theory to make him think it unnecessary to go to Mrs. Carstairs or her daughter—the fatal possibility. Or, if both of these proved impracticable as they almost certainly would, there was only one course left: he would not let Hammerton go away at all.
"But have another little drop or two, won't you? Those dips with your clothes on aren't a bit good for the health."
"Well, just a little tickler," said Charlie Hammerton. But he permitted himself to be helped quite liberally, with no protesting "when." "My regards, Mr. Varney! Also my compliments and thanks for accepting the situation like such a genuine game one."
Varney nodded. "The fortunes of war, Mr. Hammerton. But do go on. You have no idea how interesting the newspaper game is to an outsider, particularly—ha, ha!—when it walks right across his own quiet career. As I understand it, you're on the regular staff of the Gazette, and then are a special correspondent of the Daily, besides?"
Hammerton, cocksure of his game and pleasantly cheered by the potent draught, thought that he had never interviewed so agreeable a man.