“Yes.”
“And no longer?”
“No longer. It’s a vengeful kind of vermin, Ban.”
“Pop, am I a common, ordinary blackmailer? Or am I not?”
The other shook his head, grayed by a quarter-century of struggles and problems. “It’s a strange game, the newspaper game,” he opined.
CHAPTER X
All had worked out, in the matter of The Searchlight, quite as much to Mr. Ely Ives’s satisfaction as to that of Banneker. From his boasted and actual underground wire into that culture-bed of spiced sewage (at the farther end of which was the facile brunette whom the visiting editor had so harshly treated), he had learned the main details of the interview and reported them to Mr. Marrineal.
“Will Banneker now be good?” rhetorically queried Ives, pursing up his small face into an expression of judicious appreciation. “He will be good!”