THE hyphen editorial spent the following morning on the hook. Its author gave it an affectionate and yearning glance as he passed early to his desk to touch up his substitute leader on the State Council of Defense. Once fully determined upon the casting of his verbal bomb, he was eager for the explosion and the resultant battle which should end the armed truce. But, as Andrew Galpin had said, fair play demanded that he hold off now, lest he hamper the development of the Governor’s new plan. Any time was suitable for his challenge. Meanwhile copies of it from the stolen galleys had been circulated among the elect of Deutschtum, and a synopsis taken to Governor Embree. He had bidden his informants not to worry. There would be no occasion for the publication of that screed. A plan was already completed which would take care of Mr. Robson. It was observed that the Governor looked weary but optimistic. Short though the notice had been, the invited conferees responded to the official call for a meeting upon the State Council of Defense plan, almost unanimously. It was a curiously assorted gathering that surrounded the long table in the council room, when Jeremy Robson arrived, a trifle late from his work of re-casting the day’s page. That it was broadly representative was beyond denial. Yet as the newcomer reckoned it up, he felt a more than vague uneasiness. Appropriating the nearest vacant chair he found himself between a down-state lawyer and politician named Lerch on one side, and Cassius Kimball, of The Bellair Journal, on the other. Next to Kimball sat State Senator Bredle from Embree’s county, beyond him a lake-district dairyman of indeterminate political sympathies, and then Gordon Fliess, of the Fliess Brewing Company, the Lieutenant-Governor, an imposing and obsequious puppet of the Governor’s, and Ernst Bauer of the Marlittstown Herold und Zeitung. Bunched at the upper end of the table were an ill-assorted trio of The Guardian’s enemies, Montrose Clark, Judge Dana, and that anomaly of Teutonic type-reversion, Robert Wanser, grandson of the Young Germany of ’48. In the other direction, the prospect was no less puzzling nor more reassuring. Half a dozen men from the Southern Tier, a section unfamiliar to Jeremy, suggested a predominance of the Swedish type, which, in Centralia, meant anti-war sentiment. Concerning the next figure, tall, plethoric, ceremonially garbed, there was at least no uncertainty. Emil Bausch’s local letter-writing bureau of German propaganda was at that moment represented in The Guardian’s waste-basket by half a dozen grossly pro-German and subtly anti-American communications to the editor. Bausch had for neighbor that fire-eating Seminarian, the Reverend Theo Gunst, next to whom, in turn, sat Arthur Betts, of Kelter & Betts, looking uncomfortable but flattered. Milliken, presumptively representing the Socialist element, flanked him on the far side with Girdner, appearing for Labor, on his left.