For a moment Collins appeared to be quieted by this, and half seemed to abandon the project. He took it up again after a few moments, however, seemingly in the most conciliatory spirit in the world, only now he kept boring Binns with his eyes, a thing which he had never attempted before. “Aw, come on,” he repeated genially, looking Binns squarely in the eyes. “What’s the use being small about this? You know you’ve got the best of the story anyhow. And you’re goin’ to get a picture too, the same as us. If you don’t, then we’ll have to go clear to your office or send a man down to the jail. Think of the time it’ll take. What’s the use of that? One picture’s as good as another. And you can’t take any good pictures down there to-night, anyhow, and you know it.” As he talked he held Binns’s eyes with his own, and all at once the latter began to feel a curious wave of warmth, ease and uncertainty or confusion creep over him in connection with all this. What was so wrong with this proposition, anyhow, he began to ask himself, even while inwardly something was telling him that it was all wrong and that he was making a great mistake. For the first time in his life, and especially in connection with so trying a situation, he began to feel an odd sense of ease and comfort, or as if surrounded by a cloud of something that was comfortable and soothing. This scheme of Collins’s was not so bad after all, he thought. What was wrong with it? Hill and Weaver were his friends. They would make a good picture and give him one. Everything Collins was saying seemed true enough, only, only---- For the first time since knowing him, and in spite of all his opposition of this afternoon and before, Binns found himself not hating his rival as violently as he had in the past, but feeling as though he weren’t such an utterly bad sort after all. Curiously, though, he still didn’t believe a word that Collins said, but---- “To the _News_, sure,” he found himself saying in a dumb, half-numb or sensuously warm way. “That wouldn’t be so bad. It’s nearer. What’s wrong with that? Hill or Weaver will make a good picture seven or eight inches long, and then I can take it along,” only at the same time he was thinking to himself, “I shouldn’t really do this. I shouldn’t think it. He’ll claim the credit of having brought this man to the _News_ office. He’s a big bluff, and I hate him. I’ll be making a big mistake. The _Star_ or nothing--that’s what I should say. Let him come down to the _Star_.”