Others than Banneker's friends and frequenters now evinced symptoms of interest in his influence upon his environment. Approve him you might, or disapprove him; the palpable fact remained that he wielded a growing power. Several promising enterprises directed at the City Treasury had aborted under destructive pressure from his pen. A once impregnably cohesive ring of Albany legislators had disintegrated with such violence of mutual recrimination that prosecution loomed imminent, because of a two weeks' "vacation" of Banneker's at the State Capitol. He had hunted some of the lawlessness out of the Police Department and bludgeoned some decent housing measures through the city councils. Politically he was deemed faithless and unreliable which meant that, as an independent, he had ruined some hopefully profitable combinations in both parties. Certain men, high up in politics and finance at the point where they overlap, took thoughtful heed of him. How could they make him useful? Or, at least, prevent him from being harmful?

No less a potentate than Poultney Masters had sought illumination from Willis Enderby upon the subject in the days when people in street-cars first began to rustle through the sheets of The Patriot, curious to see what the editorial had to say to them that day.

"What do you think of him?" began the magnate.

"Able," grunted the other.

"If he weren't, I wouldn't be troubling my head about him. What else? Dangerous?"

"As dangerous as he is upright. Exactly."

"Now, I wonder what the devil you mean by that, Enderby," said the financier testily. "Dangerous as long as he's upright? Eh? And dangerous to what?"

"To anything he goes after. He's got a following. I might almost say a blind following."

"Got a boss, too, hasn't he?"

"Marrineal? Ah, I don't know how far Marrineal interferes. And I don't know Marrineal."

"Upright, too; that one?" The sneer in Masters's heavy voice was palpable.

"You consider that no newspaper can be upright," the lawyer interpreted.

"I've bought 'em and bluffed 'em and stood 'em in a corner to be good," returned the other simply. "What would you expect my opinion to be?"

"The Sphere, among them?" queried the lawyer.

"Damn The Sphere!" exploded the other. "A dirty, muck-grubbing, lying, crooked rag."

"Your actual grudge against it is not for those latter qualities, though," pointed out Enderby. "On questions where it conflicts with your enterprises, it's straight enough. That's it's defect. Upright equals dangerous. You perceive?"

Masters shrugged the problem away with a thick and ponderous jerk of his shoulders. "What's young Banneker after?" he demanded.

"You ought to know him as well as I. He's a sort of protege of yours, isn't he?"

"At The Retreat, you mean? I put him in because he looked to be polo stuff. Now the young squirt won't practice enough to be certain team material."

"Found a bigger game."

"Umph! But what's in back of it?"

"It's the game for the game's sake with him, I suspect. I can only tell you that, wherever I've had contact with him, he has been perfectly straightforward."

"Maybe. But what about this anarchistic stuff of his?"

"Oh, anarchistic! You mean his attacks on Wall Street? The Stock Exchange isn't synonymous with the Constitution of the United States, you know, Masters. Do moderate your language."

"Now you're laughing at me, damn you, Enderby."

"It's good for you. You ought to laugh at yourself more. Ask Banneker what he's at. Very probably he'll laugh at you inside. But he'll answer you."

"That reminds me. He had an editorial last week that stuck to me. 'It is the bitter laughter of the people that shakes thrones. Have a care, you money kings, not to become too ridiculous!' Isn't that socialist-anarchist stuff?"

"It's very young stuff. But it's got a quality, hasn't it?"

"Oh, hell, yes; quality!" rumbled the profane old man. "Well, I will tackle your young prodigy one of these days."

Which, accordingly, he did, encountering, some days later, Banneker in the reading-room at The Retreat.

"What are you up to; making trouble with that editorial screed of yours?" he growled at the younger man.

Banneker smiled. He accepted that growl from Poultney Masters, not because Masters was a great and formidable figure in the big world, but because beneath the snarl there was a quality of--no, not of friendliness, but of man-to-man approach.

"No. I'm trying to cure trouble, not make it."

"Umph! Queer idea of curing. Here we are in the midst of good times, everywhere, and you talk about--what was the stuff?--oh, yes: 'The grinning mask of prosperity, beneath which Want searches with haggard and threatening eyes for the crust denied.' Fine stuff!"

"Not mine. I don't write as beautifully as all that. It's quoted from a letter. But I'll take the responsibility, since I quoted it. There's some truth in it, you know."

"Not a hair's-weight. If you fill the minds of the ignorant with that sort of thing, where shall we end?"

"If you fill the minds of the ignorant, they will no longer be ignorant."

"Then they'll be above their class and their work. Our whole trouble is in that; people thinking they're too good for the sort of work they're fitted for."

"Aren't they too good if they can think themselves into something better?"

Poultney Masters delivered himself of a historical profundity. "The man who first had the notion of teaching the mass of people to read will have something to answer for."

"Destructive, isn't it?" said Banneker, looking up quickly.

"Now, you want to go farther. You want to teach 'em to think."

"Exactly. Why not?"

"Why not? Why, because, you young idiot, they'll think wrong."

"Very likely. At first. We all had to spell wrong before we spelled right. What if people do think wrong? It's the thinking that's important. Eventually they'll think right."

"With the newspapers to guide them?" There was a world of scorn in the magnate's voice.

"Some will guide wrong. Some will guide right. The most I hope to do is to teach 'em a little to use their minds. Education and a fair field. To find out and to make clear what is found; that's the business of a newspaper as I see it."

"Tittle-tattle. Tale-mongering," was Masters's contemptuous qualification.

"A royal mission," laughed Banneker. "I call the Sage to witness. 'But the glory of kings is to search out a matter.'"

"But they've got to be kings," retorted the other quickly. "It's a tricky business, Banneker. Better go in for polo. We need you." He lumbered away, morose and growling, but turned back to call over his shoulder: "Read your own stuff when you get up to-morrow and see if polo isn't a better game and a cleaner."

What the Great of the city might think of his journalistic achievement troubled Banneker but little, so long as they thought of it at all, thereby proving its influence; the general public was his sole arbiter, except for the opinions of the very few whose approval he really desired, Io Eyre, Camilla Van Arsdale, and more remotely the men for whose own standards he maintained a real respect, such as Willis Enderby and Gaines. Determined to make Miss Van Arsdale see his point of view, as well as to assure himself of hers, he had extracted from her a promise that she would visit The Patriot office before she returned to the West. Accordingly, on a set morning she arrived on her trip of inspection, tall, serene, and, in her aloof _genre_, beautiful, an alien figure in the midst of that fevered and delirious energy. He took her through the plant, elucidating the mechanical processes of the daily miracle of publication, more far-reaching than was ever any other voice of man, more ephemeral than the day of the briefest butterfly. Throughout, the visitor's pensive eyes kept turning from the creature to the creator, until, back in the trim quietude of his office, famed as the only orderly working-room of journalism, she delivered her wondering question:

"And _you_ have made all this, Ban?"

"At least I've remade it."

She shook her head. "No; as I told you before, I can't see you in it."

"You mean, it doesn't express me. It isn't meant to.'

"Whom does it express, then? Mr. Marrineal?"

"No. It isn't an expression at all in that sense. It's a--a response. A response to the demand of hundreds of thousands of people who have never had a newspaper made for them before."

"An echo of _vox populi_? Does that excuse its sins?"

"I'm not putting it forth as an excuse. Is it really sins or only bad taste that offends you?"

"Clever, Ban. And true in a measure. But insincerity is more than bad taste. It's one of the primal sins."

"You find The Patriot insincere?"

"Can I find it anything else, knowing you?"

"Ah, there you go wrong again, Miss Camilla. As an expression of my ideals, the news part of the paper would be insincere. I don't like it much better than you do. But I endure it; yes, I'll be frank and admit that I even encourage it, because it gives me wider scope for the things I want to say. Sincere things. I've never yet written in my editorial column anything that I don't believe from the bottom of my soul. Take that as a basis on which to judge me."

"My dear Ban! I don't want to judge you."

"I want you to," he cried eagerly. "I want your judgment and your criticism. But you must see what I'm aiming for. Miss Camilla, I'm making people stir their minds and think who never before had a thought beyond the everyday processes of life."

"For your own purposes? Thought, as you manipulate it, might be a high-explosive. Have you thought of using it in that way?"

"If I found a part of the social edifice that had to be blown to pieces, I might."

"Take care that you don't involve us all in the crash. Meantime, what is the rest of your editorial page; a species of sedative to lull their minds? Who is Evadne Ellington?"

"One of our most prominent young murderesses."

"And you let her sign a column on your page?"

"Oh, she's a highly moral murderess. Killed her lover in defense of her honor, you know. Which means that she shot him when he got tired of her. A sobbing jury promptly acquitted her, and now she's writing 'Warnings to Young Girls.' They're most improving and affecting, I assure you. We look after that."

"Ban! I hate to have you so cynical."

"Not at all," he protested. "Ask the Prevention of Vice people and the criminologists. They'll tell you that Evadne's column is a real influence for good among the people who read and believe it."

"What class is Reformed Rennigan's sermon aimed at?" she inquired, with wrinkling nostrils. "'Soaking it to Satan'; is that another regular feature?"

"Twice a week. It gives us a Y.M.C.A. circulation that is worth a good deal to us. Outside of my double column, the page is a sort of forum. I'll take anything that is interesting or authorit............