“If you really feel like it,” said Queed, remembering how the Colonel welcomed Mr. West’s occasional contributions to his columns, “of course I shall be glad to have something from you.”

“Why, my dear fellow, certainly!  Hand me some copy-paper there, and go right on with your work while I unbosom my pent-up Uticas.”

He meditated a moment, wrote rapidly for half an hour, and rose with a hurried glance at his watch.

“Here’s a little squib about the college that may serve as a space-filler.  I must fly for an engagement.  I’ll try to come down to-morrow afternoon anyway, and if you need anything to-night, ’phone me.  Delighted to help you out.”

Queed picked up the scattered sheets and read them over carefully.  He found that Director West had written a very able defense, and whole-hearted endorsement, of President West’s position in the Blaines College hazing affair.

The acting editor sat for some time in deep thought.  Eighteen months’ increasing contact with Buck Klinker and other men of action had somewhat tamed his soaring self-sufficiency.  He was not nearly so sure as he once was that he knew everything there was to know, and a little more besides.  West, personally, whom he saw often, he had gradually come to admire with warmth.  By slow degrees it came to him that the popular young president had many qualities of a very desirable sort which he himself lacked.  West’s opinion on a question of college discipline was likely to be at least as sound as his own.  Moreover, West was one of the owners and managers of the Post.

Nevertheless, he, Queed, did not see how he could accept and print this article.

It was the old-school Colonel’s fundamental axiom, drilled into and fully adopted by his assistant, that the editor must be personally responsible for every word that appeared in his columns.  Those columns, to be kept pure, must represent nothing but the editor’s personal views.  Therefore, on more than one occasion, the Colonel had refused point-blank to prepare articles which his directors wished printed.  He always accompanied these refusals with his resignation, which the directors invariably returned to him, thereby abandoning their point.  Queed was for the moment editor in the Colonel’s stead.  Over the telephone, Colonel Cowles had instructed him, four days before, to assume full responsibility, communicating with him or with the directors if he was in doubt, but standing firmly on his own legs.  As to where those legs now twitched to lead him, the young man could have no doubt.  If he had a passion in his scientist’s bosom, it was for exact and unflinching veracity.  Even to keep the Post silent had been something of a strain upon his instinct for truth, for a voice within him had whispered that an honest journal ought to have some opinion to express on a matter so locally interesting as this.  To publish this editorial would strain the instinct to the breaking point and beyond.  For it would be equivalent to saying, whether anybody else but him knew it or not, that he, the present editor of the Post approved and endorsed West’s position, when the truth was that he did nothing of the sort.