“It certainly is,” confirmed Mallory.  “But do you really think that he reasoned it all out on the spur of the moment?”

“Oh, reasoned; probably not.  It’s instinctive, I tell you.  And the twenty to the professional was a touch of genius.  Tamson will never stop talking about it.  Can’t you hear him, telling it 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 we’re on the road.  And in the editorials, I’m making people stir their minds about real things who never before developed a thought beyond the everyday, mechanical processes of living.”