“It is not my habit,” said the local potentate austerely, “to concern myself deeply with other people’s over-sensitiveness, when it is a matter of business.”
“Go easy with him,” insisted the other. “He’s got a temper. There’s a kind of a you-be-damned-ness about him. He’s a little puffed up with his new sense of power, and we’ve got to allow for that.”
“Sense of power?” The magnate looked puzzled for the moment. “Oh, you mean his paper!” He laughed. “All right, Dana. I’ll be tactful with him. But of course I shan’t tolerate any nonsense.”
The retort, “I doubt if he will, either,” was on the tip of the lawyer’s tongue. He suppressed it. It would only have irritated Montrose Clark’s vanity which, under friction, was prone to develop prickly heat.
Let him find out for himself how to handle human nettles if he could n’t take cannier men’s advice!
CHAPTER III
JUDGE DANA’S surmise as to Senator Embree and The Guardian partook of the genius of prophecy. “Smiling Mart” had been waiting to assure himself about the new control of the paper. Conviction grew within him that Jeremy Robson was the man he was looking for: that the seed planted with forethought in the mind of the unimportant Record reporter was now bringing forth harvest in The Guardian. Embree decided upon open measures.
Returning from a hasty luncheon one day, Jeremy found his den irradiated by the famous Embree smile. He was glad to see it. At the points of intersection where politics and newspaper work cross, he had encountered the leader from the Northern Tier perhaps half a dozen times since their first interview, and had liked him better each time, though their talks had been on the professional and impersonal order. No conversation with Martin Embree, however, was ever wholly impersonal. He was too intense a humanist for that. As the Legislature had adjourned for the summer, Jeremy was surprised to see Embree at the capital.