confidence he had adopted the untried scheme of having no set and
determined place for the editorial department. Sometimes, his page
appeared in the middle of the paper; sometimes on the back; and once,
when a most promising scheme of municipal looting was just about to be
put through, he fired his blast from the front sheet in extra heavy,
double-leaded type, displacing an international yacht race and a most
titillating society scandal with no more explanation than was to be
found in the opening sentence:

"This is more important to YOU, Mr. New Yorker, than any other news in
to-day's issue."

"Where Banneker sits," Russell Edmonds was wont to remark between puffs,
"is the head of the paper."

"Let 'em look for the stuff," said Banneker confidently. "They'll think
all the more of it when they find it."

Often he used inset illustrations, not so much to give point to his
preachments, as to render them easier of comprehension to the
unthinking. And always he sought the utmost of sensationalism in caption
and in type, employing italics, capitals, and even heavy-face letters
with an effect of detonation.

"Jollies you along until he can see the white of your mind, and then
fires his slug into your head, point-blank," Edmonds said.

With all this he had the high art to keep his style direct, unaffected,
almost severe. No frills, no literary graces, no flashes of wit except
an occasional restrained touch of sarcasm: the writing was in the purest
style and of a classic simplicity. The typical reader of The Patriot had
a friendly and rather patronizing feeling for the editorials: they were
generally deemed quite ordinary, "common as an old shoe" (with an
approving accent from the commentator), comfortably devoid of the
intricate elegancies practiced by Banneker's editorial compeers. So they
were read and absorbed, which was all that their writer hoped or wished
for them. He was not seeking the bubble, reputation, but the solid
satisfaction of implanting ideas in minds hitherto unaroused to mental
processes, and training the resultant thought in his chosen way and to
eventual though still vague purposes.

"They're beginning to imitate you, Ban," commented Russell Edmonds in
the days of The Patriot's first surprising upward leap. "Flattery of
your peers."

"Let 'em imitate," returned Banneker indifferently.

"Yes; they don't come very near to the original. It's a fundamental
difference in style."

"It's a fundamenta