thereby giving his factotum uncomfortably to

Too much master of his devious craft to betray discomfiture over another's superior knowledge of a subject which he had tried to make his own, Ely Ives remarked: "Then she was probably the real thing. The princess on vacation. You don't know who she was, I suppose," he added tentatively. Marrineal did not answer, thereby giving his factotum uncomfortably to reflect that he really must not expect payment for information and the information also. "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.