"Is there any reason why I should go chasing around to see him?" "That's as you choose. He doesn't see reporters often. Perhaps it would be as well." "His outfit are after the police," explained Mallory. "That's what he wants you for. It's part of their political game. Always politics." "Well, he can wait until to-morrow, I suppose," remarked Banneker indifferently. Greenough examined him with impenetrable gaze. This was a very cavalier attitude toward Judge Willis Enderby. For Enderby was a man of real power. He might easily have been the most munificently paid corporation attorney in the country but for the various kinds of business which he would not, in his own homely phrase, "poke at with a burnt stick." Notwithstanding his prejudices, he was confidential legal adviser, in personal and family affairs, to a considerable percentage of the important men and women of New York. He was supposed to be the only man who could handle that bull-elephant of finance, ruler of Wall Street, and, when he chose to give it his contemptuous attention, dictator, through his son and daughters, of the club and social world of New York, old Poultney Masters, in the apoplectic rages into which the slightest thwart to his will plunged him. To Enderby's adroitness the financier (one of whose pet vanities was a profound and wholly baseless faith in himself as a connoisseur of art) owed it that he had not become a laughing-stock through his purchase of a pair of particularly flagrant Murillos, planted for his special behoof by a gang of clever Italian swindlers. Rumor had it that when Enderby had privately summed up his client's case for his client's benefit before his client as referee, in these words: "And, Mr. Masters, if you act again in these matters without consulting me, you must find another lawyer; I cannot afford fools for clients"--they had to call in a physician and resort to the ancient expedient of bleeding, to save the great man's cerebral arteries from bursting. Toward the public press, Enderby's attitude was the exact reverse of Horace Vanney's. For himself, he unaffectedly disliked and despised publicity; for the interests which he represented, he delegated it to others. He would rarely be interviewed; his attitude toward the newspapers was consistently repellent. Consequently his infrequent utterances were treasured as pearls, and given a prominence far above those of the too eager and over-friendly Mr. Vanney, who, incidentally, was his associate on the directorate of the Law Enforcement Society. The newspapers did not like Willis Enderby any more than he liked them. But they cherished for him an unrequited respect.