“Certainly.  We’d like to have it right.  What is wrong about it?”

“Oh, nothing but some details.  You have got it substantially.  There’s a word or two and a date you are out on, naturally enough, and there are two or three little things that would be exactly true if they were differently stated.”

“Would you mind telling me what they are?”

“No,” said Jerry, with a little reluctance; “might as well have it all out—­eh, Henderson?”

And the old man took his pencil and changed some dates and a name or two, and gave to some of the sentences a turn that seemed to the reporter only another way of saying the same thing.

“There, that is all I know.  Give my respects to Mr. Goss.”

When the commissioner had withdrawn, Uncle Jerry gave vent to a long whistle.  Then he rose suddenly and called to the secretary, “Tell that reporter to come back.”  The reporter reappeared.

“I was just thinking, and you can tell Mr. Goss, that now you have got onto this thing, you might as well keep the lead on it.  The public is interested in what we are doing in the Southwest, and if you, or some other bright fellow who has got eyes in his head, will go down there, he will see something that will astonish him.  I’m going tomorrow in my private car, and if you could go along, I assure you a good time.  I want you to see for yourself, and I guess you would.  Don’t take my word.  I can’t give you any passes, and I know you don’t want any, but you can just get into my private car and no expense to anybody, and see all there is to be seen.  Ask Goss, and let me know tonight.”

The young fellow went off feeling several inches higher than when he came in.  Such is the power of a good address, and such is the omnipotence of the great organ.  Mr. Jerry Hollowell sat down and began to fan himself.  It was very hot in the office.

“Seems to me it’s lunch-time.  Great Scott! what a lot of time I used to waste fighting the newspapers!  That thing would have played the devil as it stood.  It will be comparatively harmless now.  It will make a little talk, but there is nothing to get hold of.  Queer, about the difference of a word or two.  Come, old man, I’m thirsty.”

“Uncle Jerry,” said Henderson, taking his arm as they went out, “you ought to be President of the United States.”

“The salary is too small,” said Uncle Jerry.

Of all this there was nothing to write to Margaret, who was passing her time agreeably in the Berkshire hills, a little impatient for her husband’s arrival, postponed from day to day, and full of sympathy for him, condemned to the hot city and the harassment of a business the magnitude of which gave him the obligations and the character of a public man.  Henderson sent her instead a column from The Planet devoted to a description of his private library.  Mr. Goss, the editor, who was college bred, had been round to talk with Henderson about the Southwest trip,