“Think of him?  He’s a smooth article.  Very smooth.  But I’ve seen ’em before that were straight as well as smooth.”

“Bland,” said Banneker.  “Bland with a surpassing blandness.  A blandness amounting to blandeur, as grandness in the highest degree becomes grandeur.  I like that word,” Banneker chucklingly approved himself.  “But I wouldn’t use it in an editorial, one of those editorials that our genial friend was going to appropriate so coolly.  A touch of the pirate in him, I think.  I like him.”

“Yes; you have to.  He makes himself likable.  What do you figure Mr. Ely Ives to be?”

“Henchman.”

“Do you know him?”

“I’ve seen him uptown, once or twice.  He has some reputation as an amateur juggler.”

“I know him, too.  But he doesn’t remember me or he wouldn’t have been so pleasant,” said the veteran, committing two errors in one sentence, for Ely Ives had remembered him perfectly, and in any case would never have exhibited any unnecessary rancor in his carefully trained manner.  “Wrote a story about him once.  He’s quite a betting man; some say a sure-thing bettor.  Several years ago Bob Wessington was giving one of his famous booze parties on board his yacht ‘The Water-Wain,’ and this chap was in on it somehow.  When everybody was tanked up, they got to doing stunts and he bet a thousand with Wessington he could swarm up the backstay to the masthead.  Two others wished in for a thousand apiece, and he cleaned up the lot.  It cut his hands up pretty bad, but that was cheap at three thousand.  Afterwards it turned out that he’d been practicing that very climb in heavy gloves, down in South Brooklyn.  So I wrote the story.  He came back with a threat of a libel suit.  Fool bluff, for it wasn’t libelous.  But I looked up his record a little and found he was an ex-medical student, from Chicago, where he’d been on The Chronicle for a while.  He quit that to become a press-agent for a group of oil-gamblers, and must have done some good selling himself, for he had money when he landed here.  To the best of my knowledge he is now a sort of lookout for the Combination Traction people, with some connection with the City Illuminating Company on the side.  It’s a secret sort of connection.”

Banneker made the world-wide symbolistic finger-shuffle of money-handling.  “Legislative?” he inquired.

“Possibly.  But it’s more keeping a watch on publicity and politics.  He gives himself out as a man-about-town, and is supposed to make a good thing out of the market.  Maybe he does, though I notice that generally the market makes a good thing out of the smart guy who tries to beat it.”

“Not a particularly desirable person for a colleague.”

“I doubt if he’d be Marrineal’s colleague exactly.  The inside of the newspaper isn’t his game.  More likely he’s making himself attractive and useful to Marrineal just to find out what he’s up to with his paper.”