“You know the crowd in New York behind this Automatic company as well as I do, Jason,” I said.  “Why do you want to deal with them when we’ve always been straight with you, when we’re ready to meet them and go one better?  Name your price.”

“Suppose I do—­what then,” he replied.  “This thing’s gone pretty far.  Under that damned new charter the franchise has got to be bid for—­hasn’t it?  And the people want this company.  There’ll be a howl from one end of this town to the other if we throw ’em down.”

“We’ll look out for the public,” I assured him, smiling.

“Well,” he said, with one of his glances that were like flashes, “what you got up your sleeve?”

“Suppose another telephone company steps in, and bids a little higher for the franchise.  That relieves, your aldermen of all responsibility, doesn’t it?”

“Another telephone company!” he repeated.

I had already named it on my walk.

“The Interurban,” I said.

“A dummy company?” said Mr. Jason.

“Lively enough to bid something over a hundred thousand to the city for its franchise,” I replied.

Judd Jason, with a queer look, got up and went to a desk in a dark corner, and after rummaging for a few moments in one of the pigeon-holes, drew forth a glass cylinder, which he held out as he approached me.

“You get it, Mr. Paret,” he said.

“What is it?” I asked, “a bomb!”

“That,” he announced, as he twisted the tube about in his long fingers, holding it up to the light, “is the finest brand of cigars ever made in Cuba.  A gentleman who had every reason to be grateful to me—­I won’t say who he was—­gave me that once.  Well, the Lord made me so’s I can’t appreciate any better tobacco than those five-cent ‘Bobtails’ Monahan’s got downstairs, and I saved it.  I saved it for the man who would put something over me some day, and—­you get it.”

“Thank you,” I said, unconsciously falling in with the semi-ceremony of his manner.  “I do not flatter myself that the solution I have suggested did not also occur to you.”

“You’ll smoke it?” he asked.

“Surely.”

“Now?  Here with me?”

“Certainly,” I agreed, a little puzzled.  As I broke the seal, pulled out the cork and unwrapped the cigar from its gold foil he took a stick and rapped loudly on the floor.  After a brief interval footsteps were heard on the stairs and Mike Monahan, white aproned and scarlet faced, appeared at the door.

“Bobtails,” said Mr. Jason, laconically.

“It’s them I thought ye’d be wanting,” said the saloon-keeper, holding out a handful.  Judd Jason lighted one, and began smoking reflectively.

I gazed about the mean room, with its litter of newspapers and reports, its shabby furniture, and these seemed to have become incongruous, out of figure in the chair facing me keeping with the thoughtful figure in the chair facing me.