“A railroad man. From what he tells me there was some sort of love-affair there. A girl who materialized from nowhere and spent two weeks, mostly with the romantic station-agent. Might have been a princess in exile, by my informant, who saw her twice. More likely some cheap little skate of a movie actress on a bust.”
“A station-agent’s taste in women friends—” began Marrineal, and forbore unnecessarily to finish.
“Possibly it has improved. Or—well, at any rate, there was something there. My railroad man thinks the affair drove Banneker out of his job. The fact of his being woman-proof here points to its having been serious.”
“There was a girl out there about that time visiting Camilla Van Arsdale,” remarked Marrineal carelessly; “a New York girl. One of the same general set. Miss Van Arsdale used to be a New Yorker and rather a distinguished one.”
Too much master of his devious craft to betray discomfiture over another’s superior knowledge of a subject which he had tried to make his own, Ely Ives remarked:
“Then she was probably the real thing. The princess on vacation. You don’t know who she was, I suppose,” he added tentatively.
Marrineal did not answer, thereby giving his factotum uncomfortably to reflect that he really must not expect payment for information and the information also.
“I guess he’ll bear watching.” Ives wound up with his favorite philosophy.
It was a few days after this that, by a special interposition of kindly chance, Ives, having returned from a trip out of town, saw Banneker and Io breakfasting in the station restaurant. To Marrineal he said nothing of this at the time; nor, indeed, to any one else. But later he took it to a very private market of his own, the breakfast-room of a sunny and secluded house far uptown, where lived, in an aroma of the domestic virtues, a benevolent-looking old gentleman who combined the attributes of the ferret, the leech, and the vulture in his capacity as editor of that famous weekly publication, The Searchlight. Ives did not sell in that mart; he traded for other information. This time he wanted something about Judge Willis Enderby, for he was far enough on the inside politically to see in him a looming figure which might stand in the way of certain projects, unannounced as yet, but tenderly nurtured in the ambitious breast of Tertius C. Marrineal. From the gently smiling patriarch he received as much of the unwritten records as that authority deemed it expedient to give him, together with an admonition, thrown in for good measure.
“Dangerous, my young friend! Dangerous!”