“Such as what?” Mort Caswell asked of Kleet. He was bored with these Old Boys, he had been bossed by the Old Boys of the long Caswell line for years and years, he had a club date for lunch and golf.

“When the lifeblood stops flowing to your heart, what happens?” Kleet asked the group in general.

The older men shrank back in their chairs as though Mort had thrown a live snake in their midst.

“I bite,” young Mort said, rather contemptuously. “And I’ll save time by answering. The heart stops beating and you die. R-r-right?”

Sid Kleet scarcely unclenched his teeth to say, “Right.” He turned his malevolent glance away from the younger man, toward the oldsters, a gesture of ignoring a child. “So what is the lifeblood of a newspaper? Advertising. And when the advertising stops, what happens? The newspaper dies. So, gentlemen, if we tactfully convey to the Baranof businessmen, and so forth, that they’d better quit all advertising in Storm’s weekly Northern Light and confine it to the Daily Lode, or else their business might fall off, why, in practically no time that stink you spoke about, Dave, will kind of evaporate away.”

“No,” said Czar Kennedy, mildly. He had been sitting motionless; not smoking, not waggling a foot as the others did, or tapping the arm of a chair with nervous fingers, or crossing and uncrossing his knees. “No.” Quietly.

“What’s the objection?”

Czar had kept his battered soft hat on, as he frequently did indoors. Pushed back from his brow it had the effect of a rather rowdy halo. Now as he gazed dreamily into space, a half-smile on his benevolent face, the silvery hair glinting in the sunlight of the many-windowed room, he was one of the kindlier prophets of the Bible, in store clothes.

“No objection, Sid boy—that is, no objection to the plan as a plan. It’s a clever idea, well thought-out, and workable, I’d say. But I believe in competition. Now, you say advertising is the lifeblood of the newspaper publishing business, and so it is. But competition makes a horse race, as the fella says. I’ve always been a great believer in competition. Thor moves out with his weekly, why, some other fella moves in with a weekly, some new crackpot, young, the woods seem to be full of them lately, maybe he’d be hard to handle. Now, Thor, we know his gait and speed and conformation and staying power. But you get a dark horse in there, he’s anybody’s guess. So I say, let sleeping dogs lie.”

“But he ain’t sleeping!” Dave Husack yelled.

Mortimer Caswell, in a sotto voce sneer, murmured, “You’re mixing your metaphor.” But no one heard him.

“You mean you won’t go along with this?” Dave Husack demanded of Czar.

“Not for the present,” Czar said, gently. “Not for the present, Dave boy.”

Einar Wendt, whose chin had been sunk on his chest, raised his head now and smiled amiably upon the group like a child just awakened from sleep. Indeed the crumpled ancient face was like that of an old old baby. But the eyes were shrewd and crafty. His mouth formed an O before he began to speak, as though in warning. He said everything—or almost everything—twice.