“I had never suspected it,” Dan replied.

“Has anybody suspected it?” asked Bassett quickly.

“Well; of course it has been said repeatedly that you own or control the ‘Courier.’”

“Let them keep on saying it; they might have hard work to prove it.  And—­” Bassett’s eyes turned toward the window.  His brows contracted and he shut his lips tightly so that his stiff mustache gave to his mouth a sinister look that Dan had never seen before.  The disagreeable expression vanished and he was his usual calm, unruffled self.  “And,” he concluded, smiling, “I might have some trouble in proving it myself.”

Dan was not only accumulating valuable information, but Bassett interested him more and more as a character.  He was an unusual man, a new type, this senator from Fraser, with his alternating candor and disingenuousness, his prompt solutions of perplexing problems.  It was unimaginable that a man so strong and so sure of himself, and so shrewd in extricating others from their entanglements, could ever be cornered, trapped, or beaten.

Bassett’s hands had impressed Dan that first night at Fraserville, and he watched them again as Bassett idly twisted a rubber band in his fingers.  How gentle those hands were and how cruel they might be!

The next morning Dan found that his interview with Bassett was the feature of the first page of the “Courier,” and the statement he had sent to the “Advertiser” was hardly less prominently displayed.  His editorial was the “Courier’s” leader, and it appeared verbatim et literatim.  He viewed his work with pride and satisfaction; even his ironical editorial “briefs” had, he fancied, something of the piquancy he admired in the paragraphing of the “New York Sun.”  But his gratification at being able to write “must” matter for both sides of a prominent journal was obscured by the greater joy of being the chief adjutant of the “Courier’s” sagacious concealed owner.

The “Advertiser” replied to Bassett’s statement in a tone of hilarity.  Bassett’s plea for a better accounting system was funny, that was all.  Miles, the treasurer of Ranger County, had been playing the bucket shops with public moneys, and the Honorable Morton Bassett, of Fraserville, with characteristic zeal in a bad cause, had not only adjusted the shortage, but was craftily trying to turn the incident to the advantage of his party.  The text for the “Advertiser’s” leader was the jingle:—­

     “When the devil was sick, the devil a monk would be;
     When the devil got well, the devil a monk was he!”

Bassett had left town, but the regular staff of the “Courier” kept up the fight along the lines of the articles Dan had contributed.  The “Advertiser,” finding that the Republican prosecuting attorney of Ranger County joined with the local bank in certifying to Miles’s probity, dropped the matter after a few scattering volleys.