“The Tunnel Gang?” asked Banneker, wise in the plague spots of the city.

“Just this side of their stamping ground.  It’s a gang of wharf rats.  There have been a number of hold-ups, and last week a dead woman was found under the pier.”

Banneker made an unobtrusive addition to his packing.  “They’ll have to move fast to catch me,” he observed.

“Two of us together won’t be molested.  But if you’re alone, be careful.  The police in that precinct are no good.  They’re either afraid or they stand in with the gang.”

On Fifth Avenue the pair got a late-cruising taxicab whose driver, however, declined to take them nearer than one block short of the pier.  “The night air in that place ain’t good fer weak constitutions,” he explained.  “One o’ my pals got a headache last week down on the pier from bein’ beaned with a sandbag.”

No one interfered with the two reporters, however.  A whistle from the end of the pier evolved from the watery dimness a dinghy, which, in a hundred yards of rowing, delivered them into a small but perfectly appointed yacht.  Banneker, looking about the luxurious cabin, laughed a little.

“That was a bad guess of mine about half expenses,” he said good-humoredly.  “I’d have to mortgage my future for a year.  Do you own this craft?”

“My father does.  He’s been called back West.”

Bells rang, the wheel began to churn, and Banneker, falling asleep in his berth with a vivifying breeze blowing across him, awoke in broad daylight to a view of sparkling little waves which danced across his vision to smack impudently the flanks of the speeding craft.

“We’ll be in by noon,” was Smith’s greeting as they met on the companionway for a swim.

“What do you do it for?” asked Banneker, seated at the breakfast table, with an appetite such as he had not known for weeks.

“Do what?”

“Two men’s work at twenty-five per for The Ledger?”

“Training.”

“Are you going to stick to the business?”

“The family,” explained Smith, “own a newspaper in Toledo.  It fell to them by accident.  Our real business is manufacturing farm machinery, and none of us has ever tried or thought of manufacturing newspapers.  So they wished on me the job of learning how.”

“Do you like it?”

“Not particularly.  But I’m going through with it.”

Banneker felt a new and surprised respect for his host.  He could forecast the kind of small city newspaper that Smith would make; careful, conscientious, regular in politics, loyal to what it deemed the best interests of the community, single-minded in its devotion to the Smith family and its properties; colorless, characterless, and without vision or leadership in all that a newspaper should, according to Banneker’s opinion, stand for.  So he talked with the fervor of an enthusiast, a missionary, a devotee, who saw in that daily chronicle of the news an agency to stir men’s minds and spur their thoughts, if need be, to action; at the same time the mechanism and instrument of power, of achievement, of success.  Fentriss Smith listened and was troubled in spirit by these unknown fires.  He had supposed respectability to be the final aim and end of a sound newspaper tradition.