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lush trappings of The Palace, was spellbinding the third largest audience in the theatre's history.
    Here he was, a twenty-two-year-old singer with a faint Kentucky accent, dictator of emotions to a horde of worshipful post-adolescents. Humble, handsome, heroic in fact. He did nothing but sing, step about the stage with little relation to terpsichory, and strum a Gibson guitar with steel strings.
    Yet he ruled. Unquestionably, his was a magnetism not easily denied. His singing was clear and strong, and he reached . He held them. Tightly, passionately, expertly.
    Stag Preston was doing the one thing in this world he could do in public.
    From the wings he was being watched by a pair of dark eyes. The man slouched against the flats, a cigarette dangling from a corner of his mouth, burning but forgotten. He was easily as slim as the singer, but there was lacking the wiry command inherent in every line and muscle of Stag Preston's body. Rather, this man was quick-looking. Almost feral. His eyes were set back under thin but dark eyebrows, and he watched the entire scene. He was shorter than Preston, no more than five feet seven, and his clothes hung on him with good style, unlike the clinging form of Preston's flamboyantly fitted garb.
    Sheldon Morgenstern, publicity man, ace flak-merchant of the Stem, bodyguard and handmaiden to the hottest talent in the game, inveterate chainsmoker and decrier of the human soul, stood silently watching his meal ticket.
    There was a singular lack of expression on his tanned, planed face. But his eyes, though dark, were a-swim with flickers of emotion.
    The ash lengthened on his cigarette, as he drew deeply, split among its gray folds and dropped, dusting his jacket front. He swiped at the debris absently. The cigarette burned on, unnoticed. Sing, kid , he thought. Yeah, sing .
    Behind him, the many nameless busymen who always infest backstages stood silently, listening to Stag Preston. Though their expressions were not those of the girls out front, still they were being reached , they were being held by this boy in his modern jester's motley. It was that way with anyone who listened to Stag Preston.
    He was that peculiar phenomenon, the natural talent. He was uniquely Stag Preston, with no touches of Sinatra or Presley or Darin in him. He was an electric thing on a stage, a commanding personality that instantly communicated itself.
    That was one-tenth the reason he had become the most valuable musical property in the business, inside four years. Just one-tenth.
    Four years.
    Shelly Morgenstern lipped the butt from his mouth and ground it underheel, shaking another from the pack without conscious effort. He lit it and the brief lighter flame made the stage manager wince: smoking was prohibited in the wings, so close to the highly flammable scenery. But this was his PR man, and godlings could ignore mere mortal rules.
    Four years.
    Shelly Morgenstern stared at the tilted, arched body as it made a one-step, two-step in slightest beat to the guitar's music. Stag Preston had it, all right. There was no question about it. He was Destiny's Tot. Up from nowhere, with a handful of doubloons. Nothing to sell save that which no one else had to sell. A voice, a manner, a look, a pair of hands that could innocently warp forth innocuous backgrounds to subtle oral pornography. That was all he had, yet when those components were joined and bathed by a spotlight, or trapped and grooved on an LP … he was more. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec had once said, "One should never meet the artist; the work is always so much better than the creator." That, Shelly Morgenstern mused, was more true of Stag Preston than it had ever been of anyone.
    Four years.
    Shelly Morgenstern watched as Stag Preston finished his final number. There would be no curtain call. Stag would announce a "little private show" around back in the alley under his dressing room window, and the stampede would start out of the theatre. That, they had found,