“There has never been a hint of any illegitimate use of the paper, so far as I can discover. Yet it’s pretty plain to me that he intends to use it as an instrument.”
“As soon as we’ve made it strong enough,” supplied Edmonds.
“An instrument of what?” inquired Miss Van Arsdale.
“Power for himself. Political, I suppose.”
“Does he want office?” she asked.
“Perhaps. Perhaps he prefers the deeper-lying power to make and unmake politicians. We’ve done it already in a few cases. That’s Edmonds’s specialty. I’ll know within a few days what Marrineal wants, if I can get a showdown. He and I are coming to a new basis of finance.”
“Yes; he thinks he can’t afford to keep on paying you by circulation. You’re putting on too much.” This from Edmonds.
“That’s what he got me here for. However, I don’t really believe he can. I’m eating up what should be the paper’s legitimate profits. And yet”—he smiled radiantly—“there are times when I don’t see how I’m going to get along with what I have. It’s pretty absurd, isn’t it, to feel pinched on fifty thousand a year, when I did so well at Manzanita on sixty a month?”
“It’s a fairy-tale,” declared Miss Van Arsdale. “I knew that you were going to arrive sooner or later, Ban. But this isn’t an arrival. It’s a triumph.”
“Say rather it’s a feat of balancing,” he propounded. “A tight-rope stunt on a gilded rope. Failure on one side; debt on the other. Keep going like the devil to save yourself from falling.”