Then a peculiar thing happened. Dan Irving called Bunny on the phone, and made a date for lunch. The first thing he said, “Well, the labor college is flooey—naa poo!” He went on to declare, it was a waste of time to try to keep such an enterprise alive, so long as the present labor leaders were in power; they didn’t want the young workers to be educated—it wouldn’t be so easy for the machine to control them. Last week somebody had raided the college at night, and taken most of its belongings, except the debts; Dan had decided to pay these out of his savings and quit.
“What are you going to do?” asked Bunny. And Dan explained he had been sending in news to a little press service which a bunch of radicals were maintaining in Chicago, and he had got a lot of information from Washington that had attracted attention. He had some friends there on the inside, and the upshot of it was that Dan had been offered fifteen dollars a week to go to the national capital as correspondent of this press service. “I can exist on that, and it’s the best job I can do.”
Bunny was enthusiastic. “Dan, that’s fine! There’s plenty of rascals that need to be smoked out!”
“I know it; and that’s what I want to see you about. One of the things I’ve got my eye on is these naval reserve oil leases. They look mighty fishy to me. Unless I’m missing my guess, the people behind it are Vernon Roscoe and Pete O’Reilly, and there’s bound to be black wherever their hands have touched.”
“I suppose so,” replied Bunny, trying to keep his voice from going weak.
“There’s talk in Washington that that’s how Crisby came into the cabinet. The deal was fixed up before Harding got his nomination. General Wood says the nomination was offered to him if he’d make such a deal, and he turned it down.”
“Good Lord!” said Bunny.
“Of course I don’t know yet, but I’m going to dig it out. Then I remembered that Roscoe is an associate of your father’s, and it occurred to me, it would be awkward as the devil if I was to come on anything—well, you know what I mean, Bunny—after your father was so kind to me, and you put up money for the college—”
“Sure, I know,” said Bunny. “You don’t have to worry about that, Dan. You go ahead and do your job, just as if you’d never known us.”
“That’s fine of you. But listen—I was afraid maybe some day there might be a misunderstanding, unless I got this clear, that I never got any hint on this subject from you. My recollection is positive, you’ve never mentioned it in my hearing. Is that right?”