In Our Town

The profession of newspaper making is a young man's profession. The time will come when over at our office there will be a shrinkage. Even now our leading citizens never go away from town and talk to other newspaper men that they do not say that if someone would come over here and start a bright, spicy newspaper he could drive us out of town and make money. The best friends we have, when they talk to newspaper men in other towns are not above saying that our paper is so generally hated that it would be no trouble to put it out of business. That is what people said of the General in the eighties. They do not say it now.

For the fight is over with him. And he is walking on an old battlefield, reviewing old victories, not knowing that another contest is waging further on. Sometimes the boys in the Statesman office get their money Saturday night, and sometimes they do not. If they do not, the General grandly issues "orders" on the grocery stores. Then he takes his pen in hand and writes a stirring editorial on the battle of Cold Harbor, and closes by enquiring whether the country is going to forget the grand principles that inspired men in those trying days.

In the days when the Statesman was a power in the land, editorials like this were widely quoted. He was department commander of the G. A. R. at a time when such a personage was as important in our State as the Governor. The General's editorials on pensions were read before the Pensions Committee in Congress and had much weight there, and even in the White House the General's attitude was reckoned with. When he rallied the old soldiers to any cause the earth trembled, but now the General's editorials pass unheeded. When he calls to "the men who defended this country in one great crisis to rise and rescue her again," he does not understand that he is speaking to a world of ghosts, and that his "clarion note" falls on empty air. The old boys whom he would arouse are sleeping; only he and a little handful survive. Yet to him they still live; to him their power is still invincible—if they would but rally to the old call. He believes that some day they will rally, and that the world, which is now going sadly wrong, will be set right. With his hands clasped behind him, looking through his steel-rimmed glasses, from under his shaggy brows, he walks through a mad world, waiting for it to return to reason. In his fiery black eyes one may see a puzzled look as he views the bewildering show. He is confused, but defiant. His head is still high; he has no thought of surrender. So, day after day, he riddles the bedlam about him with his broadsides, in the hourly hope of victory.

It was only last week that the General was in Jim Bolton's livery stable office asking Jim if he had any old ledgers, that the Statesman office might have. He explained that he tore off their covers, cut them up and used the unspoiled sheets for copy-paper. In Bolton's office he met a farmer from the Folcraft neighbourhood in the southern end of the county, who hadn't seen the General for half-a-dozen years. "Why—hello General," exclaimed the farmer with unconcealed surprise, as though addressing one risen from the dead. "You still around here? What are you doing now?" The old man tucked the ledger under his arm, straightened up with great dignity, and tried not to wince under the blow. He put one hand in his shiny, frayed, greenish-black frock-coat, and replied with quiet dignity, "I am following my profession, sir—that of a journalist." And after fixing the farmer with his piercing black eyes for a moment, the General turned away and was gone.

When we do something to displease him, he turns all his guns on us, though probably his foreman has to borrow paper from our office to get the Statesman out. The General regards us as his natural prey and his foreman regards our paper stock as his natural forage—but they use so little that we do not mind.

Once a new bookkeeper in our office saw the General's old account for paper. She sent the General a statement, and another, and in the third she put the words: "Please remit." The day after he had received the insult the General stalked grandly into the office with the amount of money required by the bookkeeper. He put it down without a word and walked over to the desk where the proprietor was working.

"Young man," said the General, as he rapped with his cane on the desk. "I was talking to-day with a gentleman from Norwalk, Ohio, who knew your father. Yes, sir; he knew your father, and speaks highly of him, sir. I am surprised to hear, sir, that your father was a perfect gentleman, sir. Good-morning, sir."

And with that the General moved majestically out of the office.

X

A Question of Climate

Colonel Morrison had three initials, so the town naturally called him "Alphabetical" Morrison, and dropped the "Colonel." He came to our part of the country in an early day—he used to explain that they caught him in the trees, when he was drinking creek water, eating sheep-sorrel, and running wild with a buffalo tail for a trolley, and that the first thing they did, after teaching him to eat out of a plate, was to set him at work in the grading gang that was laying out the Cottonwood and Walnut Rivers and putting the limestone in the hills. He was one of the original five patriots who laid out the Corn Belt Railroad from the Mississippi to the Pacific, and was appointed one of that committee to take the matter to New York for the inspection of capitalists—and be it said to the credit of Alphabetical Morrison that he was the only person in the crowd with money enough to pay the ferryman when he reached the Missouri River, though he had only enough to get himself across. But in spite of that the road was built, and though it missed our town, it was because we didn't vote the bonds, though old Alphabetical went through the county, roaring in the schoolhouses, bellowing at the crossroads, and doing all that a good, honest pair of lungs could do for the cause. However, he was not dismayed at his failure, and began immediately to organise a company to build another road. We finally secured a railroad, though it was only a branch.

Over his office door he had a sign—"Land Office"—painted on the false board front of the building in letters as big as a cow, and the first our newspaper knew of him was twenty years ago, when he brought in an order for some stationery for the Commercial Club. At that time we had not heard that the town supported a Commercial Club—nor had anyone else heard of it, for that matter—for old Alphabetical was the president, and his bookkeeper, with the Miss dropped off her name, was secretary. But he had a wonderfully alluring letterhead printed, and seemed to get results, for he made a living while his competitors starved. Later, when he found time, he organised a real Commercial Club, and had himself elected president of it. He used to call meetings of the club to discuss things, but as no one cared much for his monologues on the future of the town, the attendance was often light. He issued circulars referring to our village as "the Queen City of the Prairies," and on the circulars was a map, showing that the Queen City of the Prairies was "the railroad axis of the West." There was one road running into the town; the others old Alphabetical indicated with dotted lines, and explained in a foot-note that they were in process of construction.

He became possessed of a theory that a canning factory would pay in the Queen City of the Prairies, and the first step he took toward building it was to invest in a high hat, a long coat and white vest, and a pair of mouse-coloured trousers. With these and his theory he went East and returned with a condition. The canning factory went up, but the railroad rates went wrong, and the factory was never opened. Alphabetical blinked at it through his gold-rimmed glasses for a few weeks, and then organised a company to turn it into a woollen mill. He elected himself president of that company and used to bring around to our paper, notices of directors' meetings, and while he was in the office he would insist that we devoted too much space to idle gossip and not enough to the commercial and industrial interests of the Queen City.

At times he would bring in an editorial that he had written himself, highly excitable and full of cyclonic language, and if we printed it Alphabetical would buy a hundred copies of the paper containing it and send them East. His office desk gradually filled with woodcuts and zinc etchings of buildings that never existed save in his own dear old head, and about twice a year during the boom days he would bring them around and have a circular printed on which were the pictures showing the imaginary public buildings and theoretical business thoroughfares of the Queen City.

The woollen mill naturally didn't pay, and he persuaded some Eastern capitalists to install an electric plant in the building and put a streetcar line in the town, though the longest distance from one side of the place to the other was less than ten blocks. But Alphabetical was enthusiastic about it, and had the Governor come down to drive the first spike. It was gold-plated, and Alphabetical pulled it up and used it for a paper-weight in his office for many years, and it is now the only reminder there is in town of the street railway, except a hard ridge of earth over the ties in the middle of Main Street. When someone twitted him on the failure of the street railway he made answer:

"Of course it failed; here I go pawing up the earth, milking out the surplus capital of the effete East, and building up this town—and what happens? Four thousand old silurian fossils comb the moss on the north side of 'em, with mussel shell, and turn over and yawp that old Alphabetical is visionary. Here I get a canning factory and nobody eats the goods; I hustle up a woollen factory, and the community quits wearing trousers; I build for them a streetcar line to haul them to and from their palatial residences, and what do the sun-baked human mud turtles do but all jump off the log into the water and hide from them cars like they were chariots of fire? What this town needs is not factories, nor railroads, nor modern improvements—Old Alphabetical can get them—but the next great scheme I go into is to go down to the river, get some good red mud, and make a few thousand men who will build up a town."

It has been fifteen years and over since Colonel Morrison put on his long coat and high hat and started for the money markets of the East, seeking whom he might devour. At the close of the eighties the Colonel and all his tribe found that the stock of Eastern capitalists who were ready to pay good prices for the fine shimmering blue sky and bracing ozone of the West was running low. It was said in town that the Colonel had come to the end of his string, for not only were the doors of capital closed to him in the East, but newcomers had stopped looking for farms at home. There was nothing to do but to sit down and swap jack-knives with other land agents, and as they had taken most of the agencies for the best insurance companies while the Colonel was on dress parade, there was nothing left for him to do but to run for justice of the peace, and, being elected, do what he could to make his tenure for life.

Though he was elected, more out of gratitude for what he had tried to do for the town than because people thought he would make a fair judge, he got no further than his office in popular esteem. He did not seem to wear well with the people in the daily run and jostle of life. During the forty years he has been in our town, he has lived most of the time apart from the people—transacting his business in the East, or locating strangers on new lands. He has not been one of us, and there were stories afloat that his shrewdness had sometimes caused him to thrust a toe over the dead-line of exact honesty. In the town he never helped us to fight for those things of which the town is really proud: our schools, the college, the municipal ownership of electric lights and waterworks, the public library, the abolition of the saloon, and all of the dozen small matters of public interest in which good citizens take a pride. Colonel Morrison was living his grand life, in his tailor-made clothes, while his townsmen were out with their coats off making our town the substantial place it is. So in his latter days he is old Alphabetical Morrison, a man apart from us. We like him well enough, and so long as he cares to be justice of the peace no one will object, for that is his due. But, someway, there is no talk of making him County Clerk; and there is a reason in everyone's mind why no party names him to run for County Treasurer. He has been trying hard enough for ten years to break through the crust of the common interests that he has so long ignored. One sees him at public meetings—a rather wistful-looking, chubby-faced old man—on the edge of the crowd, ready to be called out for a speech. But no one calls his name; no one cares particularly what old Alphabetical has to say. Long ago he said all that he can say to our people.

The only thing that Alphabetical ever organised that paid was a family. In the early days he managed to get a home clear of indebtedness and was shrewd enough to keep it out of all of his transactions. Tow-headed Morrisons filled the schoolhouse, and twenty years later there were so many of his girls teaching school that the school-board had to make a ruling limiting the number of teachers from one family in the city school, in order to force the younger Morrison girls to go to the country to teach. In these days the girls keep the house going and Alphabetical is a notary public and a justice of the peace, which keeps his office going in the little square board building at the end of the street. But every day for the past ten years he has been coming to our office for his bundle of old newspapers. These he reads carefully, and sometimes what he reads inspires him to write something for our paper on the future of the Queen City, though much oftener his articles are retrospective. He is the president of the Old Settlers' Society, and once or twice a year he brings in an obituary which he has written for the family of some of the old-timers.

One would think that an idler would be a nuisance in a busy place, but, on the contrary, we all like old Alphabetical around our office. For he is an old man who has not grown sour. His smooth, fat face has not been wrinkled by the vinegar of failure, and the noise that came from his lusty lungs in the old days is subsiding. But he has never forgiven General Durham, of the Statesman, for saying of a fight between Alphabetical and another land agent back in the sixties that "those who heard it pronounced it the most vocal engagement they had ever known." That is why he brings his obituaries to us; that is why he does us the honour of borrowing papers from us; and that is why, on a dull afternoon, he likes to sit in the old sway-back swivel-chair and tell us his theory of the increase in the rainfall, his notion about the influence of trees upon the hot winds, his opinion of the disappearance of the grasshoppers. Also, that is why we always save a circus-ticket for old Alphabetical, just as we save one for each of the boys in the office.

He likes to sit in the old sway-back swivel-chair and tell us his theory of the increase in the rainfall

One day he came into the office in a bad humour. He picked up a country paper, glanced it over, threw it down, kicked from under his feet a dog that had followed a subscriber into the room, and slammed his hat into the waste-basket with considerable feeling as he picked up a New York paper.

"Well—well, what's the matter with the judiciary this morning?" someone asked the old man.

He did not reply at once, but turned his paper over and over, apparently looking for something to interest him. Gradually the revolutions of his paper became slower and slower, and finally he stopped turning the paper and began reading. It was ten or fifteen minutes before he spoke. When he put down the paper his cherubic face was beaming, and he said:

"Oh—I know I'm a fool, but I wish the Lord had sent me to live in a town large enough so that every dirty-faced brat on the street wouldn't feel he had a right to call me 'Alphabetical'! Dammit, I've done the best I could! I haven't made any alarming success. I know it. There's no need of rubbing it in on me."—He was silent for a time with his hands on his knees and his head thrown back looking at the ceiling. Almost imperceptibly a smile began to crack his features, and, when he turned his eyes to the man at the desk, they were dancing with merriment, as he said: "Just been reading a piece here in the Sun about the influence of climate on human endeavour. It says that in northern latitudes there is more oxygen in the air and folks breathe faster, and their blood flows faster, and that keeps their livers going. Trouble with me has always been climate—sluggish liver. If I had had just a little more oxygen floating round in my system, the woollen mill would still be running, the street-cars would be going, and this town would have had forty thousand inhabitants. My fatal mistake was one of latitude. But"—and he drawled out the word mockingly—"but I guess if the Lord had wanted me to make a town here he would have given me a different kind of liver!" He slapped his knees as he sighed: "This is a funny world, and the more you see of it the funnier it gets." The old man grinned complacently at the ceiling for a minute, and before getting out of his chair kicked his shoe-heels together merrily, wiped his glasses as he rose, put his bundle of papers under his arm, and left the office whistling an old, old-fashioned tune.

XI

The Casting Out of Jimmy Myers

It seemed a cruel thing to do, but we had to do it. For ours is ordinarily a quiet office. We have never had a libel suit. We have had fewer fights than most newspaper offices have, and while it hardly may be said that we strive to please, still in the main we try to get on with the people, and tell them as much truth as they are entitled to for ten cents a week. Naturally, we do our best to get up a sprightly paper, and in that the Myers boy had our idea exactly. He was industrious; more than that, he tried with all his might to exercise his best judgment, and no one could say that he was careless; yet everyone around the office admitted that he was unlucky. He was one of those persons who always have slivers on their doors, or tar on the knocker, when opportunity comes their way; so his stay in the office was marked by a series of seismic disturbances in the paper that came from under his desk, and yet he was in no way to blame for them.

We took him from the college at the edge of town. He had been running the college paper for a year, and knew the merchants around town fairly well; and, since he was equipped as far as education went, he seemed to be a likely sort of a boy for reporter and advertising solicitor.

One of the first things that happened to him was a mistake in an item about the opera house. He said that a syndicate had taken a lien on it. What he meant was a lease, and as he got the item from a man who didn't know the difference, and as the boy stuck to it that the man had said lien and not lease, we did not charge that up to him. A few days later he wrote for a town photographer a paid local criticising someone who was going around the county peddling picture-frames and taking orders for enlarged pictures. That was not so bad, but it turned out that the pedlar was a woman, and she came with a rawhide and camped in the office for two days waiting for Jimmy, while he came in and out of the back door, stuck his copy on the hook by stealth, and travelled only in the alleys to get his news. One could hardly say that he was to blame for that, either, as the photographer who paid for the item didn't say the pedlar was a woman, and the boy was no clairvoyant.

And camped in the office for two days, looking for Jimmy

One dull day he wrote a piece about the gang who played poker at night in Red Martin's room. Jimmy said he wasn't afraid of Red, and he wasn't. The item was popular enough, and led to a raid on the place, which disclosed our best advertiser sitting in the game. To suppress his name meant our shame before the town; to print it meant his—at our expense. It was embarrassing, but it wasn't exactly the boy's fault. It was just one of those unfortunate circumstances that come up in life. However, the advertiser aforesaid began to hate the boy.

He must have been used to injustice all his life, for there was a vertical line between his eyes that marked trouble. The line deepened as he went further and further into the newspaper business; for, generally speaking, a person who is unlucky has less to fear handling dynamite than he has writing local items on a country paper.

A few days after the raid on the poker-room Jimmy, who had acquired a particularly legible hand, wrote: "The hem of her skirt was trimmed with pink crushed roses," and he was in no way to blame for the fact that the printer accidentally put an "h" for a "k" in skirt, though the woman's husband chased Jimmy into a culvert under Main Street and kept him there most of the forenoon, while the cheering crowd informed the injured husband whenever Jimmy tried to get out of either end of his prison.

The printer that made the mistake bought Jimmy a new suit of clothes, we managed to print an apology that cooled the husband's wrath, and for ten days, or perhaps two weeks, the boy's life was one round of joy. Everything was done promptly, accurately and with remarkable intelligence. He whistled at his work and stacked up more copy than the printers could set up in type. No man ever got in or out of town without having his name in our paper. Jimmy wrote up a railroad bond election meeting so fairly that he pleased both sides, and reported a murder trial so well that the lawyers for each side kept the boy's pockets full of ten-cent cigars. The vertical wrinkle was fading from his forehead, when one fine summer morning he brought in a paid item from a hardware merchant, and went blithely out to write up the funeral of the wife of a prominent citizen. He was so cheerful that day that it bothered him.

He told us in confidence that he never felt festive and gay that something didn't happen. He was not in the building that evening when the paper went to press, but after it was printed and the carriers had left the office he came in, singing "She's My Sweetheart, I'm Her Beau," and sat down to read the paper.

Suddenly the smile on his face withered as with frost, and he handed the paper across the table to the bookkeeper, who read this item:

DIED—MRS. LILLIAN GILSEY.

Prepare for the hot weather, my good woman. There is only one way now; get a gasoline stove, of Hurley & Co., and you need not fear any future heat.

And it wasn't Jimmy's fault. The foreman had merely misplaced a head line, but that explanation did not satisfy the bereaved family.

Jimmy was beginning to acquire a reputation as a joker. People refused to believe that such things just happened. They did not happen before Mr. James Myers came to the paper—why should they begin with his coming and continue during his engagement? Thus reasoned the comforters of the Gilseys, and those interested in our downfall. The next day the Statesman wrote a burning editorial denouncing us "for an utter lack of all sense of common decency" that permitted us "to violate the sacredest feeling known to the human heart for the sake of getting a ribald laugh from the unthinking." We were two weeks explaining that the error was not the boy's fault. People assumed that the mistake could not have occurred in any well-regulated printing office, and it didn't seem probable that it could occur—yet there it was. But Jimmy wasn't to blame. He suffered more than we did—more than the bereaved family did. He went unshaven and forgot to trim his cuffs or turn his collar. He hated to go on the streets for news, and covered with the office telephone as much of his beat as possible.

The summer wore away and the dog days came. The Democratic State campaign was about to open in our town, and orators and statesmen assembled from all over the Missouri valley. There was a lack of flags at the dry-goods stores. The Fourth of July celebration had taken all the stock. The only materials available were some red bunting, some white bunting, and some blue bunting with stars dotted upon it. With this bunting the Committee on Reception covered the speakers' stand, wrapping the canopy under which the orators stood in the solid colours and the star-spangled blue. It was beautiful to see, and the pride of the window-dresser of the Golden Eagle Clothing Store. But the old soldiers who walked by nudged one another and smiled.