“I guess he’ll bear watching.”  Ives wound up with his favorite philosophy.

It was a few days after this that, by a special interposition of kindly chance, Ives, having returned from a trip out of town, saw Banneker and Io breakfasting in the station restaurant.  To Marrineal he said nothing of this at the time; nor, indeed, to any one else.  But later he took it to a very private market of his own, the breakfast-room of a sunny and secluded house far uptown, where lived, in an aroma of the domestic virtues, a benevolent-looking old gentleman who combined the attributes of the ferret, the leech, and the vulture in his capacity as editor of that famous weekly publication, The Searchlight.  Ives did not sell in that mart; he traded for other information.  This time he wanted something about Judge Willis Enderby, for he was far enough on the inside politically to see in him a looming figure which might stand in the way of certain projects, unannounced as yet, but tenderly nurtured in the ambitious breast of Tertius C. Marrineal.  From the gently smiling patriarch he received as much of the unwritten records as that authority deemed it expedient to give him, together with an admonition, thrown in for good measure.

“Dangerous, my young friend!  Dangerous!”

The passionate and patient collector thought it highly probable that Willis Enderby would be dangerous game.  Certainly he did not intend to hunt in those fields, unless he could contrive a weapon of overwhelming caliber.

Ely Ives’s analysis of Banneker’s situation was in a measure responsible for Marrineal’s proposition of the new deal to his editor.

“He has accepted it,” the owner told his purveyor of information.  “But the real fight is to come.”

“Over the policy of the editorial page,” opined Ives.

“Yes.  This is only a truce.”

As a truce Banneker also regarded it.  He had no desire to break it.  Nor, after it was established, did Marrineal make any overt attempt to interfere with his conduct of his column.

After awaiting gage of battle from his employer, in vain, Banneker decided to leave the issue to chance.  Surely he was not surrendering any principle, since he continued to write as he chose upon whatever topics he selected.  Time enough to fight when there should be urged upon him either one of the cardinal sins of journalism, the suppressio veri or the suggestio falsi, which he had more than once excoriated in other papers, to the pious horror of the hush-birds of the craft who had chattered and cheeped accusations of “fouling one’s own nest.”