CHAPTER I

CONTRABAND

CONTRABANDCHAPTER I

CONTRABAND

TUBAL gave the key another quarter turn in the quoins and tested the security of the type in the form with the heel of his grimy hand. After which he shut his eyes very tight and ran his tongue carefully over his upper teeth and clucked. Then, in the voice of one who pronounces a new and wonderful thought he spoke:

“Simmy,” he said, “I dunno. Mebby so—mebby not. There’s p’ints in favor and p’ints against.”

“I,” said Simmy with the cocksureness of his seventeen years, “am goin’ to git through. Don’t ketch me workin’ for no woman.”

“She’s one of them college wimmin we’ve been readin’ about.”

“Makes it wuss. Wimmin,” said Simmy, who had given deep thought to such matters and reached profound conclusions, “hain’t got no business gittin’ all eddicated up. What they ought to study is cook books. That’s whatIsay.”

“Calc’late she’ll be gifted with big words.”

“She’ll wear them kind of glasses,” said Simmy, “that’ll make you think you’re lookin’ into the showwinders of the Busy Big Store if you come onto her face to face.”

“Simmy, I’ll tell you suthin’.... I’ll be fifty year old, come September, and I hain’t never married one of ’em yit.”

“I hain’t never goin’ to marry, neither.”

“Shake,” said Tubal.

There ensued a silence while Tubal completed the locking of the form and secured it on the job press.

“Well,” said Tubal for the hundredth time, “Ol’ Man Nupley’s dead and gone.”

“Seems like he might ’a’ left this here paper to you ’n’ me that’s worked and slaved fer him, instid of to this female nephew of his’n....”

“Niece,” corrected Tubal. “No.... Ol’ Man Nupley wa’n’t fond of me, but he didn’t owe me no grudge to warrant him wishin’ this thing onto me. Say, we got out two issues since he passed away, hain’t we? You ’n’ me—alone and unaided.... Gawd!” Tubal mopped his brow at recollection of the mental anguish suffered in achieving this feat of editorship.

“They was dum good issues,” Simmy said, pridefully.

Tubal was not without his pride in the accomplishment—a pride tinctured with doubt which had been made acute that very morning when he stopped in the post office for the mail. Certain of the village’s professional humorists had greeted him with enthusiasm, and quoted from his works with relish. Tubal had been very much put to it for copy to fillthe paper, and had seized upon every incident, great or small, as worthy of mention, and as lengthy mention as he could achieve. He had not used one word where there was a possibility of enlisting two. For instance, after hearing it quoted, he felt there was some defect in the style of the personal which stated:

Our fellow townsman, Herbert Whitcomb, has painted his large and spacious and comfortable residence on Pine Street near the corner with a coat of white paint. Herb did the job himself, working evenings, but not Sundays, he being a Methodist and superintendent of the Sunday School. Many assembled to watch our Selectman and tyler of the Masonic lodge (Herb) working at the job of painting his residence, and thus, besides showing public spirit in improving the general appearance of our village, gave many something to do, there being no other amusement in town. Good for you, Herb. That is the spirit we like.

He had rather fancied the item about Jim Bagby, and considered he had filled the maximum space with a minute piece of news.

Jim Bagby our prominent farmer and Democrat from north of town, has been dynamiting out the stumps out of the pasture lot that he has used to pasture cattle. Jim used for the purpose the best and most powerful brand of dynamite he could get and the numerous explosions of the dynamite, each blast removing a stump out of the pasture, could be heard the length and breadth of the village. Dynamite, says Jim, is the thing to make the wilderness blossom like a rose. Another year we hope to see the pasture out of which Jim dynamited the stumps covered with the verdure of potatoes or other garden truck.

Tubal recalled the mental anguish which went into the composition of these and columns of other similar items, and solemnly renounced forever the dignities of editorship.

“No,” he said, waggling his head gravely, “I calc’late Ol’ Man Nupley done us a favor by leavin’ this sheet to somebody else.”

“She’ll be comin’ on the noon train,” said Simmy. “That’s when I quit.”

“I s’pose,” Tubal said, as he cocked his eye at a cockroach scurrying across the floor, “she’ll favor Ol’ Man Nupley in looks. Seems like that’s a cross heavier ’n any woman ought to bear.” He estimated the rate of progress of the roach, and, as it were, brought down his bird with a supremely skillfully aimed deluge of the juice of the weed. “If wimmin is goin’ to insist on keepin’ on bein’ wimmin, they ought to see to it you kin look at ’em without sufferin’.”

“Mebby she’s jest comin’ up to sell out,” said Simmy, hopefully.

“Sell? Sell this here rag?... Say!”

“Why not, I’d like to know?”

“Because,” said Tubal, “it owes about two hundred dollars more’n it’s wuth ... and, now we lost the county advertisin’, it’ll owe a dum sight more.”

He walked to the door which gave from the front of the shop to the business and editorial office of the paper, and there he stood as if upon some vantage point, surveying all that existed of the GibeonFree Press. What he saw was not especially inviting; nowhere was an indication of that romance which is believed to lurk about the business of disseminating news. The shop wore the haphazard look of a junk yard, contented to recline and snore in dust and frowziness.The room wore the air of a place where nothing ever happens and where nothing is apt to happen.... Just inside the door squatted the antiquated, limping cylinder press which gave birth weekly to theFree Press, and which gave off with sullen brazenness the look of overmuch child-bearing. It knew it was going to break down in the middle of every run, and it had been cursed at so often and so fluently that it was utterly indifferent. It was a press without ambition. Of late years it had gotten into a frame of mind where it didn’t care a hang whether it printed a paper or not—which is an alarming state of mind for a printing press to be in.... Over to the right were shelves of stock, ill sorted, dusty, dog eared at the corners where Tubal had rubbed his shoulder against them in passing. Thin stacks of red and blue board, upon which tickets for the Methodist lawn sociable or the Baptist chicken dinner might be painted, lopped with discouraged limpness over the edge of the shelving and said improper and insulting things to the slatternly press. A couple of stones elbowed each other and a case of type a little further back, and a comparatively new (and unpaid-for) job press, whose paint still existed even to shininess in spots, rather stuck up its nose at the rest of the company and felt itself altogether too good for such society. There was also a theoretical spittoon—theoretical because it was the one spot in the room safe from Tubal’s unerring jets of tobacco juice. These were the high spots arising from a jumble of rubbish which it was easier tokick about from place to place than to remove altogether.... Tubal waggled his head.

He turned to survey the business and editorial office, and found nothing there to uplift his soul. There was a grimy railing of matched lumber, inside which a table staggered under an accumulation of exchanges and catalogues and old cuts brought in to pass the evening of their lives as paper weights. An old black-walnut desk with a bookcase in its second story tried to maintain a faded dignity beside an old safe from which the combination knob had been removed for fear somebody would shut and lock it, as once happened, with disastrous results. On the wall hung a group picture of the state legislature of 1882. One could have bedded down a cow very comfortably in the waste paper on the floor.

“Simmy,” said Jake, solemnly, “she’s a hell of a messy place. Seems like we ought to kind of tidy up some for the new proprietor—or suthin’. No use, though. Hain’t no place to begin. Only thing wuth cleanin’ up is the chattel mortgage Abner Fownes holds over the place....” He turned and scowled at Simmy and smote his hands together. “By Jing!” he said, “the’s one thing we kin do—we kin wash your face. That’llshow.”

Simmy responded by jerking his thumb toward the front door, before which two men had paused, one a diminutive hunchback, the other an enormous, fleshy individual with a beard of the sort worn, not for adornment, but as the result of indolence which regards shaving as a labor not to be endured. Thepair talked with manifest excitement for a moment before they entered.

“Mornin’,” said Tubal.

“Mornin’,” said the corpulent one. The hunchback squinted and showed his long and very white teeth, but did not respond verbally to the greeting.

“Say,” said the big man, “seen the sheriff?”

“Why?” replied Tubal.

“’Cause,” said Deputy Jenney, “if you hain’t nobody has.”

“Since last night about nine o’clock,” said the hunchback in the unpleasant, high-pitched voice not uncommon to those cursed as he was cursed.

“He got off’n the front porch last night around nine o’clock and says to his wife he was goin’ out to pump him a pail of fresh water. Didn’t put on a hat or nothin’.... That’s the last anybody’s seen of him. Yes, sir. Jest stepped into the house and out of the back door——”

“Mebby he fell down the well,” said Tubal, helpfully.

“His wife’s terrible upsot. I been searchin’ for him since daybreak, but not a hide or hair kin I find—nor a soul that seen him. He might of went up in a balloon right out of his back yard for all the trace he’s left.”

“What d’ye mistrust?” asked Tubal.

“Youhain’t seen him?”

“No.”

“Well, say, don’t make no hullabaloo about it in the paper—yit. Mebby everything’s all right.”

The hunchback laughed, not a long, hearty laugh of many haw-haw-haws after the fashion of male Gibeon, but one short nasal sound that was almost a squawk.

“Might be,” said Simmy, “he sneaked off to lay for one of them rum runners.”

“What rum runners?” said the hunchback, snapping out the words viciously and fixing his gimlet eyes on the boy with an unblinking stare.

“The ones,” said Simmy, with perfect logic, “that’s doin’ the rum runnin’.”

“Hum!... Jest dropped in to ask if you seen him—and to kind of warn you not to go printin’ nothin’ prematurelike. We’ll be gittin’ along, Peewee and me.... Seems mighty funny a man ’u’d up and disappear like that, especial the sheriff, without leavin’ no word withme.” Deputy Jenney allowed his bulk to surge toward the door, and Peewee Bangs followed at his heels—a good-natured, dull-witted mastiff and an off-breed, heel-snapping, terrier mongrel....

“Well,” said Tubal, “that’s that. I hain’t mislaid no pet sheriff.”

“Mebby,” said Simmy, with bated breath, “them miscreants has waylaid him and masacreedhim.”

“Shucks!... Say, you been readin’ them dime-novel, Jesse James stories ag’in.... Go wash your face.”

In the distance, echoing from hill to hill and careening down the valley, sounded the whistle of a locomotive.

“On time,” said Tubal.

“Andhercomin’ on it,” said Simmy.

From that moment neither of them spoke. They remained in a sort of state of suspended animation, listening for the arrival of the train, awaiting the arrival of the new proprietor of the GibeonFree Press.... Ten minutes later the bus stopped before the door and a young woman alighted. Two pairs of eyes inside the printing office stared at her and then turned to meet.

“’Tain’t her,” said Tubal.

Tubal based his statement upon a preconception with which the young lady did not at all agree. She was small and very slender. Tubal guessed she was eighteen, when, as a matter of fact, she was twenty-two. There was about her an air of class, of breeding such as Tubal had noted in certain summer visitors in Gibeon. From head to feet she was dressed in white—a tiny white hat upon her chestnut hair, a white jacket, a white skirt, not too short, but of suitable length for an active young woman, and white buckskin shoes.... All these points Tubal might have admitted in the new owner of theFree Press, but when he scrutinized her face, heknew. No relative of Old Man Nupley could look like that! She was lovely—no less—with the dazzling, bewitching loveliness of intelligent youth. She was something more than lovely, she was individual. There was a certain pertness about her nose and chin, humor lurked in the corners of her eyes. She would think and say interesting things, and itwould be very difficult to frighten her.... Tubal waggled his head, woman-hater that he was, and admitted inwardly that there were points in her favor.

And then—and then she advanced toward the door and opened it.

“This is the office of theFree Press, is it not?” she said.

“Yes ’m. What kin we do for you?”

“I’m not sure. A great deal, I hope.... I am Carmel Lee—the—the new editor of this paper.”

In his astonishment Tubal pointed a lean, inky finger at the tip of her nose, and poked it at her twice before he could speak. “You!...You!” he said, and then swallowed hard, and felt as if he were unpleasantly suspended between heaven and earth with nothing to do or say.

“I,” she answered.

Tubal swung his head slowly and glared at Simmy, evidently laying the blame for this dénoûement upon the boy’s shoulders.

“Git out of here,” he whispered, hoarsely, “and for Gawd’s sake—wash your face.”

Simmy vanished, and Tubal, praying for succor, remained, nonplused, speechless for once.

“Is that my desk?” asked Miss Lee. “Um!...” Then she won Tubal’s undying devotion at a single stroke. “I presume,” she said, “you are foreman of the composing room.”

He nodded dumbly.

“You—you look very nice and efficient. I’m gladI’m going to have a man like you to help me.... Is itveryhard to run a real newspaper?”

“It’s easy. You hain’t got any idea how easy it is. Why, Simmy and me, we done it for two issues, and ’twan’t no chore to speak of!... Where’s that Simmy?... Hey, Simmy!”

“He went,” said Miss Lee, “to wash his face.... Now I think I shall go to the hotel. It’s next door, isn’t it?... After I have lunch I’ll come back, and we’ll go to work. You’ll—have to take me in hand, won’t you?... Is this a—a profitable paper?”

“By gosh! it will be. We’ll make her the doggonedest paper ’n the state. We’ll——”

“Thankyou,” said Miss Lee. “Right after lunch we’ll start in.” And with that she walked daintily out of the office and turned toward the Commercial House.... Tubal gave a great sigh and leaned on the office railing.

“Has she gone?” came a whisper from the shop.

“You come here. Git in here where I kin talk to you.”

“Here I be.... Say, when do we quit?”

“Quit? Quit what?”

“Our jobs. We was goin’ to. You ’n’ me won’t work for no woman?”

“Who said so? Who said anythin’ about quittin’, I’d like to know. Not me.... And say, if I ketch you tryin’ to quit, I’ll skin you alive.... You ’n’ me, we got to stick by that leetle gal, we have.... Foreman of the composin’ room!... By jing!... Perty as a picture.... By jing!”

“Say, you gone crazy, or what?”

“She’s a-comin’ back right after lunch. Git to work, you. Git this office cleaned up and swept up and dusted up.... Think she kin work amongst this filth.... Git a mop and a pail. We’ll fix up this hole so’s she kin eat off’n the floor if she takes a notion.... Simmy, she’s goin’ to stay and run this here paper. That cunnin’ leetle gal’s goin’ to be our boss.... Goddlemighty!...”

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