“That’s the way with your self-worshipping cross-roads towns! You raise a genius—laugh at him, pity his family—till you learn how the outside world respects him. Then—hurrah! Strike up the band, boys! When I think how that old party has been quietly studying typhoid fever and water supply all these years, with you bunch of hayseeds looking down on him as a crank—I get so blamed sore at the place that I wish I’d chucked your letter into the waste-basket when you wrote me to come!”

“It may have been a dub of a town, Billy, but it’ll be the best place in Indiana before we get through with it,” returned the editor confidently. “But whom else did you see?”

“Ran into the Honourable Hiram Cogshell on Main Street, and he slipped me this precious gem.” Billy handed Bruce a packet of typewritten sheets. “Carbon of his to-morrow’s speech. He gave it to me, he said, to save us the trouble of taking it down. The Honourable Hiram is certainly one citizen who’ll never go broke buying himself a bushel to hide his light under!”

The editor glanced at a page or two of it with wearied irritation, then tossed it back.

[Pg 11]

[Pg 11]

“Guess we’ll have to print it. But weed out some of his flowers of rhetoric.”

“Pressed flowers,” amended Billy. “Swipe the Honourable Hiram’s copy of ‘Bartlett’s Quotations’ and that tremendous orator would have nothing left but his gestures.”

“How about the grand jury, Billy?” pursued the editor. “Anything doing there?”

“Farmer down in Buck Creek Township indicted for kidnapping his neighbour’s pigs,” drawled the reporter. “Infants snatched away while fond mother slept. Very pathetic. Also that second-story man was indicted that stole Alderman Big Bill Perkins’s clothes. Remember it, don’t you? Big Bill’s clothes had so much diameter that the poor, hard-working thief couldn’t sell the fruits of his industry. Pathos there also. Guess I can spin the two out for a column.”

“Spin ’em out for about three lines,” returned Bruce in his abrupt manner. “No room for your funny stuff to-day, Billy; the celebration crowds everything else out. Write that about the Governor, and then help Stevens with the telegraph—and see that it’s carved down to the bone.” He picked up the typewritten sheets he had finished revising, and let out a sharp growl of “Copy!”

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