“At first you want to go on killing,” answered Banneker.  “Then, when it’s over, there’s a big let-down.  It doesn’t seem as if it were you.”  He paused and added boyishly:  “The evening papers are making an awful fuss over it.”

“What do you expect?  It isn’t every day that a Wild West Show with real bullets and blood is staged in this effete town.”

“Of course I knew there’d be a kick-up about it,” admitted Banneker.  “But, some way—­well, in the West, if a gang gets shot up, there’s quite a bit of talk for a while, and the boys want to buy the drinks for the fellow that does it, but it doesn’t spread all over the front pages.  I suppose I still have something of the Western view....  How much did you want of this, Mr. Greenough?” he concluded in a business-like tone.

“You are not doing the story, Mr. Banneker.  Tommy Burt is.”

“I’m not writing it?  Not any of it?”

“Certainly not.  You’re the hero”—­there was a hint of elongation of the first syllable which might have a sardonic connotation from those pale and placid lips—­“not the historian.  Burt will interview you.”

“A Patriot reporter has already.  I gave him a statement.”

Mr. Greenough frowned.  “It would have been as well to have waited.  However.”

“Oh, Banneker,” put in Mallory, “Judge Enderby wants you to call at his office.”

“Who’s Judge Enderby?”

“Chief Googler of the Goo-Goos; the Law Enforcement Society lot.  They call him the ablest honest lawyer in New York.  He’s an old crab.  Hates the newspapers, particularly us.”

“Why?”

“He cherishes some theory,” said Mr. Greenough in his most toneless voice, “that a newspaper ought to be conducted solely in the interests of people like himself.”

“Is there any reason why I should go chasing around to see him?”

“That’s as you choose.  He doesn’t see reporters often.  Perhaps it would be as well.”

“His outfit are after the police,” explained Mallory.  “That’s what he wants you for.  It’s part of their political game.  Always politics.”

“Well, he can wait until to-morrow, I suppose,” remarked Banneker indifferently.

Greenough examined him with impenetrable gaze.  This was a very cavalier attitude toward Judge Willis Enderby.  For Enderby was a man of real power.  He might easily have been the most munificently paid corporation attorney in the country but for the various kinds of business which he would not, in his own homely phrase, “poke at with a burnt stick.”  Notwithstanding his prejudices, he was confidential legal adviser, in personal and family affairs, to a considerable percentage of the important men and women of New York.  He was supposed to be the only man who could handle that bull-elephant of finance, ruler of Wall Street, and, when he chose to give it his contemptuous attention, dictator, through his son and daughters, of the club and social world of