It was an astonishing surprise to Mr. Dillingham, after groping in those pockets, to find that he brought up only a dollar bill in his left hand and forty-five cents in silver in his right. He was still contemplating in awed silence this perplexing fact when Brown handed him a five-dollar bill. "Now, you run right out and get stewed to the eyebrows again," directed Brown. "Get properly pickled and have it over with, then show up here in the morning with a headache and get to work. We want you to take charge of the Sam Stone expose, and in to-morrow's _Bulletin_ we want the star introduction of your life." "Do you mean to say you're going to trust the whole field conduct of this campaign to that chap?" asked Bobby, frowning, when Dillingham had gone. "This is his third day, so Dill's safe for to-morrow morning," Brown hastened to assure him. "He'll be up here early, so penitent that he'll be incased in a blue fog--and he'll certainly deliver the goods." Bobby sighed and gave it up. This was a new world. Over in his dingy little office, up his dingy flight of stairs, Sam Stone sat at his bare and empty old desk, looking contemplatively out of the window, when Frank Sharpe--his luxuriant gray mustache in an extraordinary and most violent state of straggling curliness--came nervously bustling in with a copy of the _Bulletin_ in his hand. "Have you seen this?" he shrilled. "Heard about it," grunted Stone. "But what do you think of it?" demanded Sharpe indignantly, and spread the paper out on the desk before the Boss, thumping it violently with his knuckles. Stone studied it well, without the slightest change of expression upon his heavy features. "It's a swell likeness," he quietly conceded, by and by. CHAPTER XXIII BOBBY BEGINS TO GIVE TESTIMONY THAT HE IS OLD JOHN BURNIT'S SON Closeted with Jolter and Brown, and mapping out with them the dangerous campaign into which they had plunged, Bobby did not leave the office of the _Bulletin_ until six o'clock. At the curb, just as he was about to step into his waiting machine, Biff Bates hailed him with vast enthusiasm. "Go to it, Bobby!" said he. "I'm backing you across the board, win, place and show; but let me give you a hot tip right from the stables. You want to be afraid to go home in the dark, or Stone's lobbygows will lean on you with a section of plumbing." "I've thought of that, Biff," laughed Bobby; "and I think I'll organize a band of murderers of my own." Johnson, whom Bobby had quite forgotten in the stress of the day, joined them at this moment. Thirty years as head bookkeeper and confidential adviser in old John Burnit's merchandise establishment had not fitted lean Johnson for the less dignified and more flurried work of a newspaper office, even in the business department, and he was looking very much fagged. "Well, Johnson, what do you think of my first issue of the _Bulletin_?" asked Bobby pleasantly. Johnson looked genuinely distressed.