day in New York and San
Francisco; a magazine the people howled for, a moving-picture film
of their real tastes and interests.

O'Mally bought "The Outcry" to make a stir, not to make a career,
but he had got built into the thing more than he ever intended. It
had made him a public man and put him into politics. He found the
publicity game diverting, and it held him longer than any other game
had ever done. He had built up about him an organization of which he
was somewhat afraid and with which he was vastly bored. On his staff
there were five famous men, and he had made every one of them. At
first it amused him to manufacture celebrities. He found he could
take an average reporter from the daily press, give him a "line" to
follow, a trust to fight, a vice to expose,--this was all in that
good time when people were eager to read about their own
wickedness,--and in two years the reporter would be recognized as an
authority. Other people--Napoleon, Disraeli, Sarah Bernhardt--had
discovered that advertising would go a long way; but Marcus O'Mally
discovered that in America it would go all the way--as far as you
wished to pay its passage. Any human countenance, plastered in
three-sheet posters from sea to sea, would be revered by the
American people. The strangest thing was that the owners of these
grave countenances, staring at their own faces on newsstands and
billboards, fell to venerating themselves; and even he, O'Mally, was
more or less constrained by these reputations that he had created
out of cheap paper and cheap ink.

Constraint was the last thing O'Mally liked. The most engaging and
unusual thing about the man was that he couldn't be fooled by the
success of his own methods, and no amount of "recognition" could
make a stuffed shirt of him. No matter how much he was advertised as
a great medicine-man in the councils of the nation, he knew that he
was a born gambler and a soldier of fortune. He left his dignified
office to take care of itself for a good many months of the year
while he played about on the outskirts of social order. He liked
being a great man from the East in rough-and-tumble Western cities
where he had once been merely an unconsidered spender.

O'Mally's long absences constituted one of the supreme advantages of
Ardessa Devine's position. When he was at his post her duties were
not heavy, but when he was giving balls in Goldfield, Nevada, she
lived an ideal life. She came to the office every