bartered for threshing machines, hayrakes, axle grease, and such like baubles of Arcadian pastime. D espite There were three topics on which one could always start an argument in Westville—politics, religion, and the editor of the Express. [Pg 16]A year before Arnold Bruce, who had left Westville at eighteen and whom the town had vaguely heard of as a newspaper man in Chicago and New York but whom it had not seen since, had returned home and taken charge of the Express, which had been willed him by the late editor, his uncle. The Express, which had been a slippered, dozing, senile sheet under old Jimmie Bruce, burst suddenly into a volcanic youth. The new editor used huge, vociferous headlines instead of the mere whispering, timorous types of his uncle; he wrote a rousing, rough-and-ready English; occasionally he placed an important editorial, set up in heavy-faced type and enclosed in a black border, in the very centre of his first page; and from the very start he had had the hardihood to attack the “established order” at several points and to preach unorthodox political doctrines. The wealthiest citizens were outraged, and hotly denounced Bruce as a “yellow journalist” and a “red-mouthed demagogue.” It was commonly held by the better element that his ultra-democracy was merely a mask, a pose, an advertising scheme, to gather in the gullible subscriber and to force himself sensationally into the public eye. [Pg 16] But despite all hostile criticism of the paper, people read the Express—many staid ones surreptitiously—for it had a snap, a go, a tang, [Pg 17]that at times almost took the breath. And despite the estimate of its editor as a charlatan, the people had yielded to that aggressive personage a rank of high importance in their midst. [Pg 17] Bruce stepped forth from his stairway, crossed Main Street, and strode up the shady Court House walk. On the left side of the walk, a-tiptoe in an arid fountain, was poised a gracious nymph of cast-iron, so chastely garbed as to bring to the cheek of elderly innocence no faintest flush. On the walk’s right side stood a rigid statue, suggesting tetanus in the model, of the city’s founder, Col. Davy West, wearing a coonskin cap and leaning with conscious dignity upon a long deer rifle. Bruce entered the dingy Court House, mounted a foot-worn wooden stairway, browned with the ambrosial extract of two generations of tobacco-chewing litigants, and
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