to his fellow pros?
'Golf's too easy for me,' he says, 'and hands me a double sawbuck! Did
ye ever hear the like!' And so the legend is built up. It's a great
thing to become a local legend. I know, for I've built up a few of 'em
myself.... I suppose the gun-play on the river-front gave him his start
at it and the rest came easy."

"Ask him. He'll probably tell you," said Mallory. "At least, he'll be
interested in your theory."

Gardner strolled over to Banneker's group, not for the purpose of
adopting Mallory's suggestion, for he was well satisfied with his own
diagnosis, but to congratulate him upon the rising strength of The
Patriot. As he approached, Miss Van Arsdale, in response to a plea from
Betty Raleigh, went to the piano, and the dwindled crowd settled down
into silence. For music, at The House With Three Eyes, was invariably
the sort of music that people listen to; that is, the kind of people
whom Banneker gathered around him.

After she had played, Miss Van Arsdale declared that she must go,
whereupon Banneker insisted upon taking her to her hotel. To her
protests against dragging him away from his own party, he retorted that
the party could very well run itself without him; his parties often did,
when he was specially pressed in his work. Accepting this, his friend
elected to walk; she wanted to hear more about The Patriot. What did she
think of it, he asked.

"I don't expect you to like it," he added.

"That doesn't matter. I do tremendously admire your editorials. They're
beautifully done; the perfection of clarity. But the rest of the
paper--I can't see you in it."

"Because I'm not there, as an individual."

He expounded to her his theory of journalism. That was a just
characterization of Junior Masters, he said: the three-ringed circus.
He, Banneker, would run any kind of a circus they wanted, to catch and
hold their eyes; the sensational acts, the clowns of the funny pages,
the blare of the bands, the motion, the color, and the spangles; all to
beguile them into reading and eventually to thinking.

"But we haven't worked it out yet, as we should. What I'm really aiming
at is a saturated solution, as the chemists say: Not a saturated
solution of circulation, for that isn't possible, but a saturated
solution of influence. If we can't put The Patriot into every man's
house, we ought to be able to put it into every man's mind. All things
to all men: that's the formula. We're far from it yet, but