owned the paper. Nor are they the
right kind of readers."

"How would you define them, then?" asked Marrineal, still in that smooth
voice.

"Small clerks. Race-track followers. People living in that class of
tenements which call themselves flats. The more intelligent servants.
Totally unimportant people."

"Therefore a totally unimportant paper?"

"A paper can be important only through what it makes people believe and
think. What possible difference can it make what The Patriot's readers
think?"

"If there were enough of them?" suggested Marrineal.

"No. Besides, you'll never get enough of them, in the way you're running
the paper now."

"Don't say 'you,' please," besought Marrineal. "I've been keeping my
hands off. Watching."

"And now you're going to take hold?" queried Edmonds. "Personally?"

"As soon as I can find my formula--and the men to help me work it out,"
he added, after a pause so nicely emphasized that both his hearers had a
simultaneous inkling of the reason for his being at their table.

"I've seen newspapers run on formula before," muttered Edmonds.

"Onto the rocks?"

"Invariably."

"That's because the formulas were amateur formulas, isn't it?"

The veteran of a quarter-century turned a mildly quizzical smile upon
the adventurer into risky waters. "Well?" he jerked out.

Marrineal's face was quite serious as he took up the obvious
implication. "Where is the dividing line between professional and
amateur in the newspaper business? You gentlemen will bear with me if I
go into personal details a little. I suppose I've always had the
newspaper idea. When I was a youngster of twenty, I tried myself out.
Got a job as a reporter in St. Louis. It was just a callow escapade. And
of course it couldn't last. I was an undisciplined sort of cub. They
fired me; quite right, too. But I did learn a little. And at least it
educated me in one thing; how to read newspapers." He laughed lightly.
"Perhaps that is as nearly thorough an education as I've ever had in
anything."

"It's rather an art, newspaper reading," observed Banneker.

"You've tried it, I gather. So have I, rather exhaustively in the last
year. I've been reading every paper in New York every day and all
through."

"That's a job for an able-minded man," commented Edmonds, looking at him
with a new respect.

"It put eye-glasses on me. But if it dimmed my eyes, it enlightened my
mind. The combined newspapers of New York do not cover