"Well, no matter--don't want it this kind of weather. I know the
man that did it. I'll get him. Now, _here_ is the way this stuff
ought to be written."
I took the manuscript. It was scarred with erasures and
interlineations till its mother wouldn't have known it if it had
had one. It now read as follows:
"SPIRIT OF THE TENNESSEE PRESS
"The inveterate liars of the _Semi-Weekly Earthquake_ are
evidently endeavoring to palm off upon a noble and chivalrous
people another of their vile and brutal falsehoods with regard to
that most glorious conception of the nineteenth century, the
Ballyhack railroad. The idea that Buzzardville was to be left off
at one side originated in their own fulsome brains--or rather in
the settlings which _they_ regard as brains. They had better
swallow this lie if they want to save their abandoned reptile
carcasses the cowhiding they so richly deserve.
"That ass, Blossom, of the Higginsville _Thunderbolt and
Battle-Cry of Freedom_, is down here again sponging at the Van
Buren.
"We observe that the besotted blackguard of the Mud Springs
_Morning Howl_ is giving out, with his usual propensity for
lying, that Van Werter is not elected. The heaven-born mission of
journalism is to disseminate truth: to eradicate error; to
educate, refine, and elevate the tone of public morals and
manners, and make all men more gentle, more virtuous, more
charitable, and in all ways better, and holier, and happier; and
yet this black-hearted scoundrel degrades his great office
persistently to the dissemination of falsehood, calumny,
vituperation, and vulgarity.
"Blathersville wants a Nicholson pavement--it wants a jail and a
poor-house more. The idea of a pavement in a one-horse town
composed of two gin-mills, a blacksmith-shop, and that
mustard-plaster of a newspaper, the _Daily Hurrah_! The crawling
insect, Buckner, who edits the _Hurrah_, is braying about this
business with his customary imbecility, and imagining that he is
talking sense."
"Now _that_ is the way to write--peppery and to the point.
Mush-and-milk journalism gives me the fan-tods."
About this time a brick came through the window with a splintering
crash, and gave me a considerable of a jolt in the back. I moved
out of range--I began to feel in the way.
The chief said: "That was the Colonel, likely. I've been expecting
him for two days. He will be up now right away."
He was correct. The Colonel appeared in the door a moment
afterwards with a dragoon revolver in his hand.
He said: "Sir, have I the honor of addressing the poltroon who
edits this mangy sheet?"
"You have. Be seated, sir. Be careful of the chair, one of its legs
is gone. I believe I have the honor of addressing the putrid liar,
Colonel Blatherskite Tecumseh?"
"Right, sir. I have a little account to settle with you. If you are
at leisure we will begin."
"I have an article on the 'Encouraging Progress of Moral and
Intellectual Development in America' to finish, but there is no
hurry. Begin."
Both pistols rang out their fierce clamor at the same instant. The
chief lost a lock of his hair, and the Colonel's bullet ended its
career in the fleshy part of my thigh. The Colonel's left shoulder
was clipped a little. They fired again. Both missed their men this
time, but I got my share, a shot in the arm. At the third fire both
gentlemen were wounded slightly, and I had a knuckle chipped. I
then said I believed I would go out and take a walk, as this was a
private matter, and I had a delicacy about participating in it
further. But both gentlemen begged me to keep my seat, and assured
me that I was not in the way.
They then talked about the elections and the crops while they
reloaded, and I fell to tying up my wounds. But presently they
opened fire again with animation, and every shot took effect--but
it is proper to remark that five out of the six fell to my share.
The sixth one mortally wounded the Colonel, who remarked, with fine
humor, that he would have to say good-morning now, as he had
business up-town. He then inquired the way to the undertaker's and
left.
The chief turned to me and said: "I am expecting company to dinner,
and shall have to get ready. It will be a favor to me if you will
read proof and attend to the customers."
I winced a little at the idea of attending to the customers, but I
was too bewildered by the fusillade that was still ringing in my
ears to think of anything to say.
He continued: "Jones will be here at three--cowhide him. Gillespie
will call earlier, perhaps--throw him out of the window. Ferguson
will be along about four--kill him. That is all for to-day, I
believe. If you have any odd time, you may write a blistering
article on the police--give the chief inspector rats. The cowhides
are under the table; weapons in the drawer--ammunition there in the
corner--lint and bandages up there in the pigeon-holes. In case of
accident, go to Lancet, the surgeon, down-stairs. He advertises--we
take it out in trade."
[Illustration: "GILLESPIE HAD CALLED"]
He was gone. I shuddered. At the end of the next three hours I
had been through perils so awful that all peace of mind and all
cheerfulness were gone from me. Gillespie had called and thrown
_me_ out of the window. Jones arrived promptly, and when I got
ready to do the cowhiding he took the job off my hands. In an
encounter with a stranger, not in the bill of fare, I had lost my
scalp. Another stranger, by the name of Thompson, left me a mere
wreck and ruin of chaotic rags. And at last, at bay in the corner,
and beset by an infuriated mob of editors, blacklegs, politicians,
and desperadoes, who raved and swore and flourished their weapons
about my head till the air shimmered with glancing flashes of
steel, I was in the act of resigning my berth on the paper when the
chief arrived, and with him a rabble of charmed and enthusiastic
friends. Then ensued a scene of riot and carnage such as no human
pen, or steel one either, could describe. People were shot, probed,
dismembered, blown up, thrown out of the window. There was a brief
tornado of murky blasphemy, with a confused and frantic war-dance
glimmering through it, and then all was over. In five minutes there
was silence, and the gory chief and I sat alone and surveyed the
sanguinary ruin that strewed the floor around us.