“I’d like to give that mind a stunt on the Argus,” said the editor.  “But about the Belmount mix-up:  you will give us a stickful now and then as we go along, if you unearth anything that the public would like to read?”

“Certainly; any and everything that won’t tend to interfere with my little intermediate scheme.  As I have intimated, I must bring Bucks to terms on my own account before I turn him over to you and the people of the State.  But I mean to be in on that, too.”

Hildreth wagged his head dubiously.

“I may be overcautious; and I don’t want to seem to scare you out, Kent.  You ought to know your man better than I do—­better than any of us; but if I had your job, I believe I should want to travel with a body-guard.  I do, for a fact.”

David Kent’s laugh came easily.  Fear, the fear of man, was not among his weaknesses.

“I am taking all the chances,” he said; and so the conference ended.

Two days later the “educational” campaign was opened by an editorial in the Argus setting forth some hitherto unpublished matter concerning the manner in which the Trans-Western had been placed in the hands of a receiver.  In its next issue the paper named the receivership after its true author, showing by a list of the officials that the road under Major Guilford had been made a hospital for Bucks politicians, and hinting pointedly that it was to be wrecked for the benefit of a stock-jobbing syndicate of eastern capitalists.

Having thus reawakened public interest in the Trans-Western affair, Hildreth sounded a new note of alarm pitched upon the efforts of the Universal Oil Company to establish itself in the Belmount oil region; a cry which was promptly taken up by other State editors.  This editorial was followed closely by others in the same strain, and at the end of a fortnight Kent was fain to call a halt.

“Not too fast, Hildreth,” he cautioned, dropping into the editor’s den late one night.  “You are doing mighty good work, but you are making it infinitely harder for me—­driving the game to deeper cover.  One of my men had a clue:  Bucks and Meigs were holding conferences with a man from the Belmount field whose record runs back to New York.  But they have taken the alarm and thrown us off the track.”

“The secretary of State’s office is the place you want to watch,” said Hildreth.  “New oil companies are incorporating every day.  Pretty soon one of these will swallow up all the others:  that one will be the Universal under another name, and in its application for a charter you’ll find askings big enough to cover all the rights and privileges of the original monopoly.”

“That is a good idea,” said Kent, who already had a clerk in the secretary of State’s office in his pay.  “But how are we coming on in the political field?”

“We are doing business there, and you have the Argus to thank for it.  You—­or your idea, I should say—­has a respectable following all over the State now; as it didn’t have until we began to leg for it.”