"Tall order, Brent!" he remarked.
"So I reckon," assented Brent. "But I've served an apprenticeship to that sort of thing. And I've always gone through with whatever came in my way."
"Let's be plain," said Tansley. "You mean that you want to settle here in the town, and go on with Wallingford's reform policy?"
"That's just it," replied Brent. "You've got it."
"All I can say is, then, that you're rendering yourself up to—well, not envy, but certainly to hatred, malice and all uncharitableness, as it's phrased in the Prayer Book," declared Tansley. "You'll have a hot old time!"
"Used to 'em!" retorted Brent. "You forget I've been a press-man for some years."
"But you didn't get that sort of thing?" suggested Tansley, half incredulous.
Brent flicked the ash from his cigar and smiled.
"Don't go in for tall talk," he said lazily. "But it was I who tracked down the defaulting directors of the Great Combined Amalgamation affair, and ran to earth that chap who murdered his ward away up in Northumberland, and found the Pembury absconding bank-manager who'd scooted off so cleverly that the detectives couldn't trace even a smile of him! Pretty stiff propositions, all those! And I reckon I can do my bit here in this place, on Wallingford's lines, if I get the right to intervene, as a townsman. That's what I want—locus standi."
"And when you've got it?" asked Tansley.