“It is, if he sees we’re going to involve her, he’ll quit.”

Moyese didn’t answer.  He rose from his chair and walked to a rear window, where he stood looking out.  Did he credit what he had heard?  Was it a recital of facts, or a distortion of facts through a tainted mind?  Did Brydges, himself, believe what he had tried to convey?  Or was his job to obtain certain results at any cost:  and was this part of the cost?  Ask yourself that of the tainted news you read every day.  Ask why those who recognize the lie do not brand it as such; why those who are uncertain do not verify before they repeat and credit; and you will probably have some clue to the little melodrama of dishonor enacted in the office of a legal luminary at Smelter City that sweltering hot July day.  When you come to observe it, Bat’s recital contained nothing that might not have been posted in eminent respectability on a church warden’s door.  Like fresh fruit passed through a mouldy cellar, the facts came from the medium of the narrator with the unclean contagion of cellar mould.  The next narrator would not pass on the facts.  He would pass on the cellar rot.

“If we served up those two stories together hot,” emphasized Bat, “we’d about cut the throat of any opposition to our interests in the Valley?  He’d quit!  I’ll bet before he’d see her involved, he’d jump his job!”

When the Senator turned his face to the handy man, he was very sober.  He stood looking over the tops of his glasses boring into Bat’s face.

“It’s a pity,” he said.

“Yes, it’s too bad:  one hates to have one’s faith in human nature all balled out this way; but you never know what kind of a fact you’re going ping up against where a woman is concerned.”  Something in the Senator’s look stopped Bat mid-way.

“Brydges, I thought I told you never to meddle with the damphool who makes excuses for what he’s going to do.  Never do anything, unless you have some end worth while in view; then, if it’s worth while, do it, damn it, and don’t waste time excusing the means!  Now, I’ll have nothing to do with this; mind that, Brydges.  You do it off your own responsibility.  If MacDonald were one of our party, I wouldn’t make use of it, if it were ten times over and over true.  You’ll have to be very careful how you use that, at all!  It’s effective.  I don’t deny it’s very effective; but it’s a pity!  If you use that at all, you’ll have to use it so it’s not libelous.”

“Libelous?” burst out the handy man wakening up suddenly, scratching his tousled head and trying to make head or tail of orders that said ‘do it’ and ‘don’t do it’ in one breath.  “I can write it without a name so every man in the State will know who it is:  give it as a joke; fetch in Calamity as the mother of the whole mess; the call of the blood, you know; reversion to type!  They’ll have to prove that the intent was malice before they can get a judgment.  They’ll have to come out with the truth before they can prove libel.  It isn’t libelous if it’s done as a joke without malice.”