hey shook
him with lines of thought that were new to him; and gave him insights,
not into new biological laws, but into new applications of the old laws.
They were too earnest to be always polite, and more than once the
chairman rapped and pounded for order.

It chanced that a cub reporter sat in the audience, detailed there on a
day dull of news and impressed by the urgent need of journalism for
sensation. He was not a bright cub reporter. He was merely facile and
glib. He was too dense to follow the discussion. In fact, he had a
comfortable feeling that he was vastly superior to these wordy maniacs of
the working class. Also, he had a great respect for those who sat in the
high places and dictated the policies of nations and newspapers. Further,
he had an ideal, namely, of achieving that excellence of the perfect
reporter who is able to make something--even a great deal--out of
nothing.

He did not know what all the talk was about. It was not necessary. Words
like _revolution_ gave him his cue. Like a paleontologist, able to
reconstruct an entire skeleton from one fossil bone, he was able to
reconstruct a whole speech from the one word _revolution_. He did it
that night, and he did it well; and since Martin had made the biggest
stir, he put it all into his mouth and made him the arch-anarch of the
show, transforming his reactionary individualism into the most lurid, red-
shirt socialist utterance. The cub reporter was an artist, and it was a
large brush with which he laid on the local color--wild-eyed long-haired
men, neurasthenia and degenerate types of men, voices shaken with
passion, clenched fists raised on high, and all projected against a
background of oaths, yells, and the throaty rumbling of angry men.

CHAPTER XXXIX

Over the coffee, in his little room, Martin read next morning's paper. It
was a novel experience to find himself head-lined, on the first page at
that; and he was surprised to learn that he was the most notorious leader
of the Oakland socialists. He ran over the violent speech the cub
reporter had constructed for him, and, though at first he was angered by
the fabrication, in the end he tossed the paper aside with a laugh.

"Either the man was drunk or criminally malicious," he said that
afternoon, from his perch on the bed, when Brissenden had arrived and
dropped limply into the one chair.

"But what do you care?" Brissenden asked. "Surely you don't desire the
approv