“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 the available field.  They do not begin to cover it....  Did you say something, Mr. Banneker?”

“Did I?  I didn’t mean to,” said Banneker hastily.  “I’m a good deal interested.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” returned Marrineal with gravity.  “After I’d made my estimate of what the newspapers publish and fail to publish, I canvassed the circulation lists and news-stands and made another discovery.  There is a large potential reading public not yet tied up to any newspaper.  It’s waiting for the right paper.”

“The imputation of amateurishness is retracted, with apologies,” announced Russell Edmonds.

“Accepted.  Though there are amateur areas yet in my mind.  I bought The Patriot.”

“Does that represent one of the areas?”

“It represents nothing, thus far, except what it has always represented, a hand-to-mouth policy and a financial deficit.  But what’s wrong with it from your point of view?”