What he had felt, in the writing of it, to be jerks and bumps were magically smoothed out in the finished product.  At one point where the copy-reader’s blue pencil had elided an adjective which the writer had deemed specially telling, he felt a sharp pang of disappointed resentment.  Without that characterization the sentence seemed lifeless.  Again, in another passage he wished that he had edited himself with more heed to the just word.  Why had he designated the train as “rumbling” along the cut?  Trains do not rumble between rock walls, he remembered; they move with a sustained and composite roar.  And the finger-wringing malcontent who had vowed to “soom”; the editorial pencil had altered that to “sue ’em,” thereby robbing it of its special flavor.  Perhaps this was in accordance with some occult rule of the trade.  But it spoiled the paragraph for Banneker.  Nevertheless he was thrilled and elate....  He wanted to show the article to Io.  What would she think of it?  She had read him accurately:  it was in him to write.  And she could help him, if only by—­well, if only by being at hand....  But Gardner’s letter!  That meant that the pursuit was on again, more formidably this time.  Gardner, the gadfly, stinging this modern Io out of her refuge of peace and safety!

He wrote and dispatched a message to the reporter in care of the Angelica City Herald: 

Glad to see you, but you are wasting your time.  No such person could be here without my knowing it.  Thanks for article.

That was as near an untruth as Banneker cared to go.  In his own mind he defended it on the ground that the projected visit would, in fact, be time wasted for the journalist since he, Banneker, intended fully that Gardner should not see Io.  Deep would have been his disgust and self-derision could he have observed the effect of the message upon the cynical and informed journalist who, however, did not receive it until the second day after its transmission, as he had been away on another assignment.

“The poor fish!” was Gardner’s comment.  “He doesn’t even say that she isn’t there.  He’s got to lie better than that if he goes into the newspaper game.”

Further, the reporter had received a note from the cowman whom Ban and Io had encountered in the woods, modestly requesting five dollars in return for the warranted fact that a “swell young lady” had been seen in Banneker’s company.  Other journalistic matters were pressing, however; he concluded that the “Manzanita Mystery,” as he built it up headline-wise in his ready mind, could wait a day or two longer.