remember more things than you ever heard of. Why, Sadie and I went
skating the night you couldn't find your fat horse and sleigh."
"Ya-a-a--" yelled Payley, with a sudden shriek of laughter. "Never knew
who took your rig, did you, Sim?"
"You--you--" said Sim, glaring at Banks. "You confounded horse thief, I
believe you took Sadie in my own sleigh."
"Ain't he bright, Pudge," gasped Payley, "only took him thirty years to
catch on."
"Well, Banksie," said Sim, "Sadie's been more particular about her
young men since that night. We've been married twenty-five years, and I
guess I'll let you come up and eat this evening, anyway. She lets me
bring most any old pelter home."
"Gosh, boys, I can't."
"Say, what are you? the porter on that varnished car down there?"
demanded Sim. "Won't they let you off a minute?"
"Tell you what we'll do," said Pelty Amthorne. "We'll take you to band
practice to-night. Sim still runs it, but he won't let me play any
more."
"I haven't touched a horn since I left Homeburg," laughed Banks. "But
I'd give ten dollars to see you and Wimble Horn blat away on those altos
again, with your eyes bulging out of your cheeks."
"We'll get Wimble and we'll break up band practice if you'll stay over."
"I--"
"No, you don't," said Sim. "I won't have riff-raff loafing around my
band."
"You won't, eh?" said Banks. "We'll show you. Come down to the car while
I send about forty telegrams, and then we'll fix you, Mister Askinson."
Which they did that night, while most of the town looked on. The next
fall Banks came back and stayed three days, and his conduct and that of
his old companions in crime set an example to our younger generation
which didn't wear off for years. They went out orchard robbing in an
automobile, and Banks said he never realized before the wonder of modern
conveniences.
VII
THE HOMEBURG WEEKLY DEMOCRAT
_Which Swamps the Post-Office Every Friday_
No, Jim, as I have already said about thirty-four times this week, I
don't care for a paper. Don't buy one for me. I could read your New York
papers for twenty-four hours at a stretch, and at the end of the time I
would have to stop some good-natured looking chap and ask what the news
was. It's all there, I know, but I don't seem able to find it. Even the
Chicago baseball scores are hidden in the blamed things. Instead of
putting them first, the way they ought to, they stick them down at the
end of the page. As for the editorial pages, I might as well go to
Labrador and hunt for personal friends as to read them. If there's
anything that makes a stranger feel about ten thousand miles from home,
with the cars not running, it is to get into the editorial page of an
unknown newspaper and try to sit in with the family discussions. It
makes me feel like a man who has gotten into a reunion of the Old
Settlers' Association of Zanzibar by mistake.
It's not much of a trick to go into a strange town and learn to navigate
from hotel to hotel, but it's a hopeless task to try to find your way
around a strange newspaper. Takes about two years to learn to read a
strange newspaper skilfully, anyway, and find your way through it
without banging into the want ads when you want to find the editorials,
and tripping over the poets' column when you are hunting for the crop
reports. You've been buying a paper every time you turned a corner for
the last week, Jim--you New Yorkers seem to have to have a paper about
as often as a whale needs a new lungful of air--and I've taken a hasty
look at all of them, but when I get home I am going to ask my wife what
has happened in the U. S. while I've been away from Homeburg. Outside of
the eternal Mexican case, I don't seem to have discovered a thing.
Mind you, I don't blame your papers for bearing down hard on the local
news. I suppose it's mighty interesting to you New Yorkers to learn
every morning just how much more money you owe on your new subway, and
whether or not the temperature of Mrs. Van Damexpense's second-best
Siberian wolf-hound is still rising. That's what newspapers are for--to
save you the trouble of stepping around and collecting the events of the
day from the back fence. But your papers don't bear down hard enough on
the Homeburg happenings, and that's why they don't suit me.
I don't pretend that our Homeburg paper is the equal of yours in any
particular. The best I can say for it is that it's no worse than it was
ten years ago. It hasn't any three-story type, and you could read it for
years without discovering who was being divorced in San Francisco or
murdered in Chicago. People who depend on it don't know yet that war has
been declared in the Balkans, and they won't hear any more politics
until 1916. All week long I think as little about the paper as all this.
But somehow, when Thursday evening comes around, rain or shine, I step
over to the post-office, and if my paper isn't there, I wait a few
minutes, growing more impatient all the time, and then I drift over to
the door of the _Homeburg Weekly Democrat_ office and join the silent
throng.
Like as not I'll find twenty people there. We don't expect any wild
news. There will probably not be anything in the _Democrat_ when it
comes out, but we want to make sure of it. We don't want to go home
without the paper. We've read it for twenty years, and every week we
open it up and poke through its internals after a sensation that will
stand Homeburg on its ear and split the Methodist church from steeple to
pipe organ. We're as patient as fishers in the Seine, and the fact that
the world has never rocked when the _Democrat_ did come out doesn't
discourage us any.
We want our paper, and so we stand there and grumble. Now and then one
of us stumps up the narrow hallway to the second story where the
_Democrat_ makes its lair, and looks on with an abused air while two
young lady compositors claw around the bottom of the boxes for enough
type to set the last items, and the foreman stuffs the forms of the last
two pages with old boiler plate, medicine ads and anything that will
fill. There isn't any reason for the _Democrat_ being late any more
than there is for the branch accommodation train, which got almost to
town on time once and stood beyond the crossing for twenty minutes
because her conductor forgot just when she was due and didn't want to
run in too soon. The _Democrat_ is just late naturally. It's part of its
function to be late. Makes it more eagerly sought after. We talk with
the foreman and make nuisances of ourselves generally, and presently old
man Ayers, who runs the paper, waddles in with another item to be set.
The compositors set down their sticks with a jerk and say, "Oh, my
land!" and the foreman goes and puts the item on the case with that air
of patient resignation which is a little more irritating than a swift
kick; and then Chet Frazier, if he's hanging around, which he usually
is, speaks up:
"For goodness' sakes, Ayers, let that item go and get to press," he
says. "Give it to me and I'll read it aloud down-stairs, your whole
subscription list's down there waiting."
But we have to wait just the same until the item is set up. Then the
foreman locks up the forms and bangs them on the face with his big
wooden plane, and he and the old man lug them out into the pressroom
while we all hold our breath--sometimes the form explodes on the way and
then we don't get the _Democrat_ for three days.
Pretty soon we hear the rattle-te-bang-te-clank-te-clicketty-clang of
the old press, and in five minutes more Editor Ayers comes out with an
armful of folded papers all fragrant with fresh black ink.
[Illustration: "She's out, boys," he says.]
"She's out, boys," he says. Then we grab copies and hurry to spread the
news of the birth of another _Democrat_. We open the sheet and look
carefully down the page where old man Ayers generally conceals his local
news. For a minute or two there is silence. Then somebody crams his
paper into his pocket. "Hmph, nothing in it," he says, and starts home.
He's right, too. Outside of the fact that it has another week of old man
Ayers's laborious and worried life in it, it is mighty bare. There isn't
enough news in it to cause a thrill in a sewing circle. But after supper
at home, when we look it over more carefully and the first hot flush of
anticipation has worn off, we do find a lot of information. We find that
Miss Ollie Mingle has gone to Paynesville for a two days' visit (aha,
that Paynesville young man's folks are going to look her over), and that
Mrs. Ackley is visiting her daughter in Ogallala, Neb. (Unless Ackley
straightens up, we don't expect her back.) Wimble Horn is erecting a new
porch and painting his house. (He must have beaten the bucket shop for
once.) We also find that Jedson Bane's peaches are ripe and of the best
quality, which fact he has just proven to the editor's entire
satisfaction. And that old Mrs. Gastit is feeling very poorly, and Pete
Parson, while working on his automobile the other night, contributed a
forefinger to the cause of gasoline by poking around in the cogs while
the engine was running.
All of this is news and interesting to us; so is the fact that Miss Ri
Hawkes is not teaching in the Snyder district school this week, because
of a sore toe. While this item does not jar the country quite so
extensively as it would if Miss Hawkes belonged to one of your leading
New York families, and was employing an eleven-thousand-dollar physician
to treat her for gout, it is just as important to Miss Hawkes. And there
you have the great keynote of our Homeburg journalism. In the eyes of
the _Democrat_ we are all equal.
There are not many of us Homeburgers. We will never see twenty-five
hundred again, for as families grow smaller, most of the Illinois towns
like Homeburg are contracting slowly in size even while prosperous. The
_Democrat_ hasn't above seven hundred subscribers, but every one of
those subscribers gets his name in the paper at least once a year, even
if it is only a general mention of his patriotism when he pays his
annual subscription. No baby born in Homeburg is too humble to get its
exact weight heralded to the world through the _Democrat_. Mrs.
Maloney's pneumonia and Banker Payley's quinsy grieve the town in the
same paragraph under the heading "Among our sick." The Widow Swanson's
ten-mile trip down the line to a neighboring town gets as careful
attention as Mrs. Singer's annual pilgrimage to California. In the
matter of news we are a pure democracy. The man who buys a new
automobile gets no more space than the member of Patrick McQuinn's
section crew who scores a clean scoop by digging his potatoes one week
ahead of the town. And when the humblest of us lies down in death he
does it with the serene consciousness that he will get half a column,
anyway, with more if his disease is rare and interesting, and that at
the end of the article the city will sympathize with the family in its
bereavement. When Mrs. Agnew died of her broken hip she got a column,
though she had been financially unable to take the paper for years,
while in the same issue Jay Gould got a two-inch obituary in its boiler
plate inside.
Your big papers pride themselves on their brevity, except in murder
cases, and I understand that almost every New York editor thinks he
could boil the story of the Creation down into less than the six hundred
words which the Bible wasted on it. But Editor Ayers could give all your
editors instructions in this kind of economy. If the Creation had
happened around Homeburg while he was on the job, he would have called
attention to it the next week about as follows:
"We understand there was a creation in these parts during the last week.
We did not learn the particulars but those who were on the ground at the
time say that it was a successful affair, and that the new world is
doing as well as could be expected under the circumstances."
Ayers would write it this way for two reasons. In the first place he
hates to write more than one paragraph. Coming after a hard day's work
collecting bills and chasing subscribers, it is a wearing effort.
Nothing gets much space in the _Democrat_ except obituaries and
marriages, and they are all contributed--the former by the relatives and
the latter by the minister. In the second place, there wouldn't be any
use of wasting a lot of space on a big item because by the time the
_Democrat_ comes out, everybody knows all about it, and the mere facts
would be stale and unimportant beside the superstructure of soaring
fancy which has been built up by the easy-running imaginations of our
chief news dispensers on the street corners. And so, when the creamery
burns down or the evening fast freight runs through an accommodation on
the crossing, the old man puts his duty off until the last minute and
then writes a few well-chosen lines merely to let us know that he is on
the job and lets no news escape him. When you are running a weekly
paper, your competitors in the news business are the talkers in the town
who mingle seven days a week and issue a hundred thrilling extras to
their fellow citizens before your press day comes around.
Besides, as I have said, old man Ayers can't afford to waste much time
chasing news. He has to get a living for himself as well as for the
_Democrat_, and keeping both his family and the paper alive is a
distinct feat performed weekly. His pay-roll for a foreman and two
girls must amount to over fifteen dollars a week, and that means cold
solid cash which must be wrung from a reluctant public. Seems to me I
never go into a store that I don't see old man Ayers trying to collect a
little cash on an advertising account or wheedling a subscriber into
coming out of the misty past and creeping cautiously down a few years
toward the present on his subscription account. If there is anything
which we can't do without and for which we positively object to paying
real money, it is our home newspaper. Sim Bone has a roaring shoe
business and pays cash for his automobiles, but he has often told me
that paying good paper money for advertising would be as wasteful as
eating it. He carries an ad in the _Democrat_ all the year and changes
it about every six months. It's July now, and he is still advertising
bargains in overshoes--but he won't pay any money. Ayers has to trade
the account out, as he has to do with every other advertiser in the
town.
People pity the poor ministers' families who have to live on the
scrambled proceeds of donation parties, but an editor's family in our
parts has even harder luck. I have seen Ayers order two suits of clothes
from a clothier who owed him a big bill and was getting wabbly, and then
pass by the meat market empty-handed, because his advertising account
there was traded out. He told me once that he has taken disk-plows,
flaxseed, magazines, encyclopedias and a new back porch in trade for
advertising and subscriptions, but that he has been wearing an obsolete
pair of spectacles, to his great discomfort, for ten years, because our
local jeweler will not advertise. The doctors in town carry cards in the
paper and owe him large amounts because his family is too healthy to
catch up with them; but it will be two years before either of our local
dentists accumulates a big enough bill to allow Mrs. Ayers to have some
very necessary construction and betterment work, as the railroad folks
say, done to her teeth.
If it weren't for the patent medicine ads, Ayers tells me, he wouldn't
be able to keep afloat for want of ready cash. He says a patent medicine
may be an abomination before the Lord, but that a patent medicine
advertising agent looks to him like a very present help in time of
trouble. The agent comes in and beats him down until he agrees to
publish several hundred yards of notices next to pure reading matter on
all sides for fifteen dollars. But the fifteen dollars is cash--he
doesn't have to take the stuff in trade. And so we are forever running
into such thrilling headlines as, "Horrible Wreck," "Her escape was
simply marvelous," "Worse than the Titanic Disaster," in the
_Democrat's_ local page. And then we exclaim: "Hurray! Real news at
last," and prowl eagerly down the items only to find that the horrible
wreck was a citizen of Swamp Hollow upon whom a wonderful cure was
effected; that "Her escape" was from inflammatory rheumatism by the aid
of Gettem's Dead Shot Specific, and that the Titanic Disaster is
eclipsed annually by the sad ends of thousands of people who neglect to
take Palaver's Punk Pills. It always makes us mad, but we can't kick. If
it weren't for the patent medicine people, we would have to pay for the
_Democrat_ all by ourselves.
They say that when Editor Ayers first came to Homeburg some forty years
ago he was a bright young man with a great rush of words from the pen,
and that he had a dapper air and was generally admired. The _Democrat_
contained about a page of solid editorial opinion each week on
everything, from the tariff to the duty of Russia, in whatever crisis
was then pending, and people swore by the paper and didn't make up
their opinions until they had read it. But times have changed. We don't
stand in awe of the _Democrat_ any more. Most of us laugh at it, even
those of us who are not financiers enough to keep our subscriptions
called up. We call it the "Weekly Gimlet" and the "Poorly Democrat," and
we make bright remarks to old man Ayers when he asks us for news and
tell him that he ought to turn the paper inside out so that we can read
the boiler plate first and not have to wade through his stuff. But he
doesn't object. Time and toil and the worry of keeping cash enough on
hand to pay the expressman who dumps his ready prints on the floor each
Wednesday and refuses to budge until he has collected $3.24 have taken
the pepper out of him. He doesn't write editorials any more except on
the week following a national election, and they are affairs of duty
which always begin: "Another election has come and gone and the party
of Jackson--"
He has made a living for forty years and has sent two sons through
college from the _Democrat_, and the effort has taken the fight out of
him. I never saw him resent a joke but once. That was when Pelty
Amthorne told him that his wife considered the _Democrat_ to be the best
paper she had ever seen. He let Ayers burst a couple of buttons from his
vest in his swelling pride before he explained that the _Democrat_, when
cut in two, exactly fitted his wife's pantry shelves, and that she
didn't have to trim it a bit. The old man turned on his heel without a
word and that week he kindled his old-time fires and wrote the following
for the local page:
A citizen of Homeburg who hasn't done anything more exciting for twenty
years than stand off his grocery bill poked fun at the _Democrat_ last
week to our face because there wasn't any more news in it. News, say
we--News in Homeburg? News in a town where an ice-cream social is a
sensation and a dog fight suspends business for three hours? News in a
town where it takes a couple five years to work up a wedding and seven
kinds of wedding cake is the only news in it? Where the city marshal
hasn't made an arrest for two years because no one has done anything
after nine P.M. except snore, and where they have to put up the lamps in
pairs to keep them from getting lonesome? We don't print news from
Homeburg because there isn't any, and the old rooster who joshed us
knows it. He's sore because we can't make half a column out of his trip
to Paynesville eight miles away last summer, but we'll promise to do
better. We'll dump the paste pot in the fire, throw the old shears out
of the window and get out a regular screamer of a _Democrat_ some week;
a paper with red ink on it and big headlines and a real piece of news in
it. We will when this gabby old fossil does his part. When he pays his
six years' subscription, we'll write two columns about it. And even then
no one will believe it.
Lafe Simpson, who runs the _Argus_, is a younger man than Ayers and more
ambitious. Oh, yes, we have two papers. In a town the size of Homeburg
you simply have to have two papers, because half of the people are
always mad at one paper. The _Argus_ and _Democrat_ trade subscription
lists about every seven years--not counting the hard-shell Democrats and
blown-in-the-bottle Republicans who have to stand by their papers
whether they get mad at them or not. I've been taking the _Democrat_ for
about five years because Simpson got too busy in the school election one
year to suit me. It's pretty hard on me, because Simpson runs a better
paper; but my neighbor, Sim Askinson, likes the _Democrat_ better and
can't take it because he took his whole family to Chicago one week, and
Ayers overlooked the fact. So he borrows my _Democrat_ every week and I
get his _Argus_, and thus both of us preserve our mad and our dignity
and get what we want just the same.
If there's anything keener than the competition between two weekly
newspapers in a small town, I'd like to see it--but not feel it. It's a
searching sort of competition which seems to work its way into every
detail of the town's affairs. We town people are judged by our editors
according to our patronage. If a man gives two jobs of letterheads in
succession to the _Argus_, Ayers looks on him as a man who has stabbed
him in the back and has twisted the sword. If the Board of Education
spends $67 for commencement invitations with the _Democrat_ one year and
$69.50 with the _Argus_ the next, things aren't exactly calm and
peaceable again until the discrimination has been explained. When twins
come to a man who has always taken the _Argus_ in preference to the
_Democrat_, old man Ayers wags his head as if to say, "He brought it on
himself;" and when Lafe Simpson meets a man who persistently refuses to
take his paper in preference to the sheet across the street, he greets
him as formally and warily as if he had smallpox and was passing free
samples around.
Lafe claims to have more circulation than the _Democrat_, and this comes
nearer giving Ayers apoplexy than anything else. He claims that Lafe's
circulation consists two thirds of wind and that he hasn't more than 750
bona fide subscribers, including deadhead copies to patent medicine
houses. Lafe, on the other hand, says Ayers prints 750 papers merely
from force of habit--that most of his subscribers have been trying to
stop the paper for years and can't. Lafe says that when a man puts his
name on Ayers's subscription list, he might as well carve it in stone
and then try to wipe it off with gasoline. Ayers says, in return, that
when a stranger arrives to make his home in Homeburg, Lafe Simpson meets
him at the train, takes him to his new residence, and hangs around the
doorstep until the stranger subscribes for the _Argus_ in order to
improve the atmosphere around the neighborhood.
Of course the two papers are always on opposite political sides--no
matter whether it is a school or national election. Makes us scheme a
good deal at times to keep one of them quiet on some public project so
that the other will not jump on it. We had a big time, when the plan to
pave Main Street was going through, to keep Lafe from jumping in and
shouting for it. That would have set Ayers off dead against it, and we
had to muzzle Lafe until Ayers had committed himself.
The struggles of the two editors to outdo each other have been titanic.
When Simpson put in a steam engine, Ayers mortgaged his plant and got
one of the new gasoline engines just then being introduced into an
unhappy world. He never used it much unless he had lots of time in which
to start it, but it was a great comfort and held Simpson level. When
Simpson bought the building in which the _Argus_ is printed, it nearly
killed Ayers, who couldn't have bought the sign on his building. But he
finally prevailed on the owner to put in a new front and name his block
"The Democrat Building." But about that time Simpson, who is a go-ahead
young chap, bought a young automobile in the last stage of lung trouble,
and Ayers has never really recovered from that blow.