"See here, cull," he retorted, dropping into the vernacular of the Under World, and wheeling his chair suddenly so as directly to face me, "I don't know who you are outside of your card; but, as I said before, you're _on_, so it seems, and I don't want to treat a good guy like you on the cross. It's no use your wasting my time or me wasting yours in jollying. _But you can't get a line in your newspaper that's going to queer me._ See? And in no other paper in this little burg. Understand? I guess you know all about reporting down to the ground. But there's some sides of the newspaper business that you ain't next to yet. This is one of them. You may as well quit right here as far as I am concerned, for nixy a line of roast goes that you push out about me." "And _that_, too, goes in my story," I replied, rather hotly. He smiled indulgently, yawned, and rose. "Come and have lunch with me some day," he said. "You seem a spry boy, and I may throw something in your way." "I've got stuff for a front-page display," I reported to the city editor half an hour later. "I--ah--don't think we need it," replied the little man with the tired eyes whom I addressed. "You can put in a bill for your time, but--you needn't write it. Orders from the old man." I knew that the advertising end of the newspaper had once more been wagging the editorial tail, and that, once again, it had been decided that it was better to protect a rogue rather than lose his half-page "ad." in the Sunday edition, to say nothing of his quarter pages during the balance of the week! Robins knew whereof he spoke when he assured me that there was "nothing doing" in regard to himself. When I left his office, he simply telephoned his advertising agent, explaining the situation. The latter, in turn, telephoned the business department of the newspaper, and--there you are. Curiously enough, Robins seemed to take a fancy to me for some reason or other. On more than one occasion he made me an enticing offer to enter his employ as publicity man or press agent. But I couldn't swallow my prejudice against his "plants" in the first place, and I had other and sufficiently lucrative affairs in hand in the second. Still, we ran into each other at times, and he never failed to jolly me on the score of my failure to show him up. To return to our meeting on the pier head; after an apparently hearty greeting from him, he asked if I had seen "Peck" Chalmers on board. He explained that Chalmers was to have returned to America on the steamer on which I had crossed, but apparently hadn't. "Of course," said Robins, "Peck would have come under a monacher [alias], so I wasn't sure if he was on the passenger list or not." I knew the fellow he spoke of, a quiet, elderly, well-mannered and cleanly shaven man of forty-five or so, who looked like a minister in mufti, but who, in reality, was a clever gambler and "con gun"; one of Robins's own profession.