advertised the fact that he was a good hater by showing his barrel to
callers at his office. In that barrel he had filed away every
disreputable thing that he had been able to find against friend or foe,
far or near, and when the friend became a foe, or the foe became
troublesome, the General opened his barrel. He kept also an office
blacklist, on which were written the names of the men in town that were
never to be printed in the _Statesman_. When we established our little
handbill of a newspaper, he made all manner of fun of our "dish-rag," as
he called it, and insisted on writing so much about our paper that
people read it to see what we had to say. Other papers had made the
mistake of replying to the General in kind, and people had soon tired of
the quarrel and dropped the new quarrelling paper for the old one. The
State never had seen the General's equal as a wrangler; but we did not
fight back, and there was only a one-sided quarrel for the people to
tire of. We grew and got a foothold in the town, but the General never
admitted it. He does not admit it now, though his paper has been cut
down time and again, and is no larger than our little dish-rag was in
the beginning. But he still maintains his old assumption of the power
that departed years ago. He walked proudly out of the County Convention
the day that it rode over him, and he still begins the names of the new
party leaders in the county in small letters to show his contempt for
them.
The day of his downfall in the County Convention marked the beginning of
his decline in State politics. When it was known that his county was
against him, people ceased to fear him and in time new leaders came in
the State whom he did not know even by sight; but the General did not
recognise them as leaders. To him they were interlopers. He sent his
paper regularly to the old leaders, who had been shoved aside as he had
been, and wrote letters to them urging them to arouse the people to
throw off the chains of bossdom. Five years ago he and a number of
lonesome and forgotten ones, who formerly ruled the State with an iron
hand, and whose arrogance had cost the party a humiliating defeat,
organised the "Anti-Boss League," and held semi-annual conventions at
the capital. They made long speeches and issued long proclamations, and
called vehemently upon the people to rend their chains, but some way the
people didn't heed the call, and the General and his boss-busters, as
they were called, began to have hard work getting their "calls" and
"proclamations" and "addresses" into the city papers. The reporters
referred to them as the Ancient Order of Has-Beens, and wounded the
General's pride by calling him Past Master of the Grand Lodge of Hons.
He came home from the meeting of the boss-busters at which this insult
had been heaped upon him and bellowed like a mad bull for six months,
using so much space in his paper that there was no room at all for local
news.
In the General's idea of what a newspaper should contain; news does not
come first, and he does not mind crowding it out. He believes that a
newspaper should stand for "principles." The _Statesman_ was started
during the progress of the Civil War, when issues were news, and the
General has never been able to realize that in times of peace people buy
a newspaper for its news and not for its opinions. He never could
understand our attitude toward what he called "principles." When the
town was for free silver, we were for the gold standard, and we never
exerted ourselves particularly for a high tariff, and when the General
saw our paper grow in spite of its heresies, he was amazed, and
expressed his amazement in columns of vitriolic anger. Because we often
ignored "issues" and "principles" and "great basic and fundamental
ideas," as he called his contentions on the silver and tariff questions,
for lists of delegates at conventions, names of pupils at the county
institute, and winners of prizes at the fair, he was filled with alarm
for the future of the noble calling of journalism.
Long ago we quit making fun of him. One day we wrote an article
referring to him as "the old man," and it was gossiped among the
printers that he was cut to the heart. He did not reply to that, and
although a few days later he referred to us as thieves and villains, we
never had the heart to tease him again, and now every one around the
office has instructions to put "General" before his name whenever it is
used. Probably this cheers him up. At least it should do so, for in
spite of his pride and his much advertised undying wrath, he is in truth
a tender-hearted old man, and has never been disloyal to the town. It is
the apple of his eye. His fierceness has always been more for
publication than as an evidence of good faith. He likes to think that he
is unforgiving and relentless, but he has a woman's heart. He fought the
renomination of Grant for a third term most bitterly, but when the old
commander died, the boys in the _Statesman_ office say that Durham
sniffled gently while he wrote the obituary, and when he closed with the
words "Poor Grant," he laid his head on the table and his frame shook in
real sorrow.
Most of the subscribers have left his paper, and few of the advertisers
use it, but what seems to hurt him worst is his feeling that the town
has gone back on him. He has given all of his life to this town; he has
spent thousands of dollars to promote its growth; he has watched every
house on the town-site rise, and has made an item in his paper about it;
he has written up the weddings of many of the grandmothers and
grandfathers of the town; he has chronicled the birth of their children
and children's children. The old scrapbooks are filled with kind things
that the General has written. Old men and old women scan these wrinkled
pages with eyes that have lost their lustre, and on the rusty clippings
pasted there fall many tears. In this book many a woman reads the little
verse below the name of a child whom only she and God remember. In some
other scrapbook a man, long since out of the current of life, reads the
story of his little triumph in the world; in the family Bible is a
clipping from the _Statesman_--yellow and crisp with years--that tells
of a daughter's wedding and the social glory that descended upon the
house for that one great day. So, as the General goes about the streets
of the town, in his shiny long frock-coat and his faded campaign hat,
men do not laugh at him, nor do they hate him. He is the old buffalo,
horned out of the herd.
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.
[Illustration: 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