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Jap Herron: A Novel Written from the Ouija Board

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Title: Jap Herron: A Novel Written from the Ouija Board

Dubious author: Mark Twain

Author of introduction, etc.: Emily Grant Hutchings


        
Release date: November 20, 2010 [eBook #33048]
                Most recently updated: January 6, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33048

Credits: Produced by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JAP HERRON: A NOVEL WRITTEN FROM THE OUIJA BOARD ***




Produced by Al Haines










[Frontispiece: A DRAWING FROM LIFE BY JOHN CECIL CLAY]





JAP HERRON


A NOVEL WRITTEN FROM

THE OUIJA BOARD



WITH AN INTRODUCTION

THE COMING OF JAP HERRON




by

Emily Grant Hutchings




NEW YORK

MITCHELL KENNERLEY

MCMXVII




COPYRIGHT 1917 BY

MITCHELL KENNERLEY



PRINTED IN AMERICA




THE COMING OF "JAP HERRON"


On the afternoon of the second Thursday in March, 1916, I responded to
an invitation to the regular meeting of a small psychical research
society.  There was to be a lecture on cosmic relations, and the
hostess for the afternoon, whom I had met twice socially, thought I
might be interested, my name having appeared in connection with a
recently detailed series of psychic experiments.  To all those present,
with the exception of the hostess, I was a total stranger.  I learned,
with some surprise, that these men and women had been meeting, with an
occasional break of a few months, for more than five years.  The record
of these meetings filled several type-written volumes.

When word came that the lecturer was unavoidably detained, the hostess
requested Mrs. Lola V. Hays to entertain the members and guests by a
demonstration of her ability to transmit spirit messages by means of a
planchette and a lettered board.  The apparatus was familiar to me; but
the outcome of that afternoon's experience revealed a new use for the
transmission board.  After several messages, more or less personal, had
been spelled out, the pointer of the planchette traced the words:

"Samuel L. Clemens, lazy Sam."  There was a long pause, and then:
"Well, why don't some of you say something?"

I was born in Hannibal, and my pulses quickened.  I wanted to put a
host of questions to the greatest humorist and the greatest philosopher
of modern times; but I was an outsider, unacquainted with the usages of
the club, and I remained silent while the planchette continued:

"Say, folks, don't knock my memoirs too hard.  They were written when
Mark Twain was dead to all sense of decency.  When brains are soft, the
method should be anaesthesia."

Not one of those present had read Mark Twain's memoirs, and the plaint
fell upon barren soil.  The arrival of the lecturer prevented further
confession from the unseen communicant; but I was so deeply impressed
that I begged my hostess to permit me to come again.  For my benefit a
meeting was arranged at which there was no lecturer, and I was asked to
sit for the first time with Mrs. Hays.

In my former psychic investigation, it had been my habit to pronounce
the letters as the pointer of the planchette indicated them, and Mrs.
Hays urged me to render the same service when I sat with her, because
she never permitted herself to look at the board, fearing that her own
mind would interfere with the transmission.  Scarcely had our
finger-tips touched the planchette when it darted to the letters which
spelled the words:

"I tried to write a romance once, and the little wife laughed at it.  I
still think it is good stuff and I want it written.  The plot is
simple.  You'd best skeletonize the plot.  Solly Jenks, Hiram
Wall--young men.  Time, before the Civil War."

Then the outline of a typical Mark Twain story came in short, explosive
sentences.  It was entitled, "Up the Furrow to Fortune."  A brief
account of its coming seems vital to the more sustained work which was
destined to follow it.  I was not present at the next regular meeting
of the society; but at its close I was summoned to the telephone and
informed that Mark Twain had come again and had said that "the Hannibal
girl" was the one for whom he and Mrs. Hays had been waiting.  When
they asked him what he meant, the planchette made reply:

"Consult your record for 1911."

One of the early volumes of the society's record was brought forth, and
a curious fact that all the members of the society had forgotten was
unearthed.  About a year after his passing out, Mr. Clemens had told
Mrs. Hays that he had carried with him much valuable literary material
which he yearned to send back, and that he would transmit stories
through her, if she could find just the right person to sit with her at
the transmission board.  Although she experimented with each member of
the club, and with several of her friends who were sympathetic though
not avowed investigators, he was not satisfied with any of them.  Then
she gave up the attempt and dismissed it from her mind.  A
twenty-minute test with me seemed to convince him that in me he had
found the negative side of the mysterious human mechanism for which he
had been waiting.

The work of transmitting that first story was attended with the
greatest difficulty.  No less than three distinct styles of diction,
accompanied by correspondingly distinct motion in the planchette under
our fingers, were thrust into the record.  At first we were at a loss
to understand these intrusions.  That they were intrusions there could
be no doubt.  In each case there was a sharp deviation from the plot of
the story, as it had been given to us in the synopsis.  After one of
these experiences, which resulted in the introduction of a paragraph
that was rather clever but not at all pertinent.  Mark regained control
with the impatiently traced words:

"Every scribe here wants a pencil on earth."

Not until the middle of summer did we achieve that sureness of touch
which now enables us to recognize, intuitively, the presence of the one
scribe whose thoughts we are eager to transmit.  That the story of Jap
Herron and the two short stories which preceded it are the actual
post-mortem work of Samuel L. Clemens, known to the world as Mark
Twain, we do not for one moment doubt.  His individuality has been
revealed to us in ways which could leave no question in our minds.  The
little, intimate touches which reveal personality are really of more
importance than the larger and more conspicuous fact that neither Mrs.
Hays nor I could have written the fiction that has come across our
transmission board.  Our literary output is well known, and not even
the severest psychological skeptic could assert that it bears any
resemblance to the literary style of "Jap Herron."

Mrs. Hays has found the best market for her short stories with one of
the large religious publishing houses, and in the early days Mark Twain
seemed to fear that her subconscious mind might inadvertently color or
distort his thought, in process of transmission.  We had come to the
end of our fourth session when he added this:

"There will be minor errors that you will be able to take care of.  I
don't object.  Only--don't try to correct my grammar.  I know what I
want to say.  And, dear ladies, when I say d-a-m-n, please don't write
d-a-r-n.  Don't try to smooth it out.  This is not a smooth story."

That Mark should fear the blue pencil, at our hands, amused us greatly.
The story bristles with profanity and is roughly picturesque in its
diction.  It deals with a section of the Ozark country with which
neither of us is familiar, and in the speech of the natives there are
words that we had never heard, that are included in no dictionary but
are, it transpires, perfectly familiar to the primitive people in the
southwestern part of the state.  When the revision of the story was
almost complete.  Mark interrupted the dictation, one afternoon, to
remark:

"You are too tired.  Forces must be strong for results.  Somebody
handed you a lemon, back there.  Cut out that part about the apple at
fly time.  I am not carping.  You have done well.  The interpretation
is excellent.  I was afraid of femininity.  Women have their ideas, but
this is not a woman's story.  Good-bye."

There was another meeting, at which the revision of "Up the Furrow to
Fortune" was completed, and then we went to work on the second story,
"A Daughter of Mars."  As in the case of the first one, it began with a
partial synopsis.  Vallon Leithe, an enthusiastic aeronaut, was resting
after a long flight, when a strange air-craft fell out of the sky,
lodging in the top of a great tree.  The occupant of the marvelously
constructed flying machine proved to be a girl from the planet Mars.
Her name was Ulethe, and she had many thrilling adventures on our
earth.  The synopsis ended with the wholly unexpected words:

"Now, girls, it is not yet clear in my mind whether we'd better send
Ulethe back to Mars, kill her, marry her to Leithe, or have an
expedition from Mars raise the dickens.  But we will let it develop
itself."

The board, on which two short stories and a novel have already been
transmitted, is one of the ordinary varieties, a polished surface over
which the planchette glides to indicate the letters of the alphabet and
the figures from 1 to 10.  In the main our dictation came without any
apparent need for marks of punctuation.  Occasionally the words
"quotation marks," or "Put that in quotes" would be interjected.  Once
when my intonation, as I pronounced the words for the amanuensis who
was keeping our record, seemed to indicate a direct statement, the
planchette whirled under our fingers and traced the crisp statement, "I
meant that for a question."

When I told my husband of these grippingly intimate evidences of an
unseen personality, it occurred to him that a complete set of
punctuation marks, carefully applied in India ink, where the pointer of
the planchette could pick them out as they were required, would
facilitate the transmission of sustained narrative.  To him it seemed
that the absence of these marks on the board must be maddening,
especially to Mark Twain, whose thought could be hopelessly distorted
by the omission of so trivial a thing as a comma, and whose subtle use
of the colon was known to all the clan of printers.  Before our next
meeting the board had been duly adorned with ten of the most important
marks, including the hyphen and the M-dash.  The comma was at the head
of the right-hand column and the apostrophe at the bottom.  My husband,
Mrs. Hays and I knew exactly what all these markings meanly yet we had
some confusion because Mark insisted on using the comma when he wished
to indicate a possessive case.  The sentence was this, as I understood
it:

"I was not wont to disobey my father, scommand."

Instantly my husband, who had become interested and had taken the place
of our first amanuensis, perceived that I had made a mistake, when I
pronounced the combination, "f-a-t-h-e-r, comma, s-c-o-m-m-a-n-d."

"But," I defended myself, "the pointer went to the comma.  I can see
now that it should have been the apostrophe."  As I spoke the pointer
of the planchette traced the words on the board:

"Edwin did a pretty piece of work, but that apostrophe is too far down.
I am in danger of falling off the board every time I make a run for it."

The result was that another apostrophe was placed in the middle of the
board, directly under the letter S.  In connection with the M-dash we
had a yet more startling evidence of an outside personality, one
dependent on us for his means of communication, but wholly independent
of our thought and knowledge.  Mark had dictated the synopsis for the
second story and had enlarged upon the first situation.  Then, as has
since become his fixed habit, he indicated that the serious work for
the evening was ended, and returned for an informal chat.  Mrs. Hays
and I had discussed the plot at some lengthy and after my husband had
read aloud the second evening's dictation we commented on some of the
obscure points, our fingers resting, the while, lightly on the
planchette.  Suddenly it became agitated, assumed a vigorous sweeping
motion and traced very rapidly these words:

"It is starting good; but will you two ladies stop speculating?  I am
going to take care of this story.  Don't try to dictate.  You are
interrupting the thread of the story.  There is ample time for
smoothing the rough places.  I am not caviling.  I am well pleased."
After a pause, he continued: "There is the same class of
interruption--those who could write stories, but are not to write
my----"  At this, the planchette turned to the M-dash and slid back and
forth under it several times.  It then spelled the word "stories."  We
were utterly at a loss, until he explained: "I was using that black
line for an underscore."

Again and again we have had the word "good" in an adverbial
construction, a usage that is not common to either Mrs. Hays or me; but
Mark has told us that he liked it, in familiar conversation.  We have
tried to adhere with absolute fidelity to even the seeming errors which
came over the board.

The second installment of the story gave all of us much trouble.
Incidentally it served to develop several bits of humorous
conversation.  When it was finished, we received this comment:

"I think that is all we can do to-night.  I intend to enlarge upon this
chapter before going further.  The forces are not strong enough
to-night.  We will rewrite this part Monday night."

We naturally expected a rehandling of that installment, which for
convenience he had designated a "chapter."  To our surprise, the
pointer of the planchette gave this:

"I have changed my mind.  We will proceed to New York.  I will probably
want to handle chapter second in a different way.  It reads like a
printed porous plaster; but that is no one's fault.  Begin!"

The dictation went smoothly, and there were no interruptions from the
unseen rivals who had so persistently contested Mark Twain's right to
the exclusive use of our "pencil."  Before the next meeting I was urged
to take a prominent part in another piece of psychic work, and to
persuade both my husband and Mrs. Hays to join me.  I said nothing to
either one of them about it, intending to discuss it with them when the
evening's work was over.  As soon, however, as we applied our finger
tips to the planchette, this astonishing communication came:

"I am afraid that my pencil-holders are going to get wound up in other
stuff that will make much confusion.  I heard Emily talking over the
telephone and making promises that are not good for our work."

When I had been questioned concerning the meaning of this rebuke, and
had explained its import, Mark added: "If we are going to make good
there must be concentration, to that end.  Get busy."  We did!  It was
a hot July night, and the planchette flew over the board so swiftly
that at times I could scarcely keep pace with it as I pronounced the
letters.  With other amanuenses I had been forced to pronounce the
finished words, and to repeat sentences in whole or in part; but after
my husband came into the work this was not necessary.  As much as a
score of letters might be run together, to be divided into words after
the dictation was ended.  Sometimes, when I had failed utterly to catch
the thought, and would hesitate or ask to have the thing repeated, my
husband would say to me: "Don't stop him.  I know what it means."  Mrs.
Hays avoided looking at the board lest her own mind interfere with the
transmission, and with less efficient help, the entire responsibility
had been on me.  When I came to realize that nothing was expected of me
beyond the mere pronouncing of the letters, the three of us developed
swiftly into a smoothly working machine.  Yet Mark was constantly
worried for fear that my heart would be alienated and that I would "go
chasing after strange gods," as he once put it.

When he had finished the fifth installment of the story, with a climax
that surprised and puzzled us, he said:

"I reckon we had better lay by for a few days till I get this thing
riffled out.  It has slipped its tether.  I have had such things happen
often.  Don't get scared."

We discussed the use of the word "riffle," and then Mark became serious.

"I don't want to be disappointed in the Hannibal girl.  I have been
trying for several years to get through to the light.  I don't want a
false sentiment for a crew of fanatics to wreck my chance.  I don't
want to act nasty, but if you go into that other work I am likely to
ruin your reputation.  You are likely to explode into some of the
mediocre piffle that is the height and depth of such would-be
communications with the other world.  There is nothing to hold to.  So,
my dear girls, if you want a future, cut it out.  I don't want to
command all your time, but right now it is best to avoid all
complications."

It is needless to say I declined the invitation.  After this, whenever
anything went wrong, the rebuke or complaint was invariably addressed
to me.  When there were humorous or pleasant things to be said, they
were dispensed equally to the three of us, whom Mark Twain had come to
designate as "my office force."  Two bits of personal communication
came within the succeeding week which seem to have a bearing on the
whole mysterious experience.  That second installment was undertaken
and abandoned again and again.  Finally he said:

"I am going ahead with the main body of the story.  There will be
another round with that second chapter, but not until the theme is
fully developed.  The second chapter sticks in my throat like the
cockleburr that I tried to swallow when I was five.  It won't slip down
or come up."

We had worked patiently on the latter part of the narrative and had
accomplished a big evening's work, when the dictation was interrupted
by this remark:

"It is going good; but I sure wish that I had Edwin's pipe."

We fairly gasped with astonishment; but we had no time for comment, as
the planchette continued its amazing revelation:

"Smoke up, old man, for auld lang syne.  In the other world they don't
know Walter Raleigh's weed, and I have not found Walter yet to make
complaint.  I forget about it till I get Edwin's smoke.  But for pity's
sake, Ed, cut out that tobacco you were trying out.  It made me sick.
I hoped it would get you, so that you wouldn't try it again."

My husband; whom neither Mrs. Hays nor I would, under any
circumstances, address by the abbreviation of his name, "Ed," asked
Mark what tobacco he had in mind.  He replied:

"That packet you were substituting, or that some one that had a grudge
against you gave you."

A comparison of dates revealed the fact that on the evening when that
troublesome second installment was transmitted, my husband had smoked
some heavy imported tobacco that had been given to him by a friend he
had met that afternoon.  The circumstance had passed from the minds of
all of us.  Indeed, it had never impressed us in the least, and it had
not occurred to any of us that our unseen visitor still retained the
sense of smell, or that he could distinguish between two brands of
tobacco.  He had given evidence of both sight and hearing, had told us
frequently that he was tired, at the end of a long evening's work, and
had made other incidental revelations of his environment and condition:
but his reference to the pipe was more significant than any of them.

Early in August, when our second story was nearing completion, the
transmission began with this curious bit, which none of us understood
for a long time:

"Emily, I think that when we finish this story we will do a pastoral of
Missouri.  There appear high lights and shadows, purple and dark, and
the misty pink of dawnings that make world-weary ones have surcease."

Not until "Jap Herron" was more than half finished did we realize that
it was the Missouri pastoral.  There was one other veiled reference to
that story which must not be omitted.  We had planned a trip to New
York, for some time in October or early November, although we had never
discussed it while at the board.  One evening Mark terminated his
dictation abruptly, and said:

"Emily, I think well of your plan."  I asked what plan he referred to.
"New York.  I will go, too.  I will try to convince them that I am not
done working.  I am rejuvenated and want to finish my work.  When I was
in New York last I had a very beautiful dream.  I did not understand it
then.  It meant that my days were numbered, and gave me the picture of
an angel bringing a book from heaven to earth, and on its cover was
blazoned this: MARK TWAIN'S COMPLIMENTS.  Ask them what they think
about that.  I was so tired--so tired that I could not rest.  A cool
hand seemed to soothe my weariness away and I slept, and, sleeping,
dreamed."

When I found that passage in the early part of our record, I wondered
if "Jap Herron" might be the book sent to earth with Mark Twain's
compliments.  I asked him about it, one evening when our regular
dictation had been finished.  The reply was a slow journey of the
planchette to the word, "Yes," followed by the rapidly spelled words,
"But old Mark isn't done talking yet."

We assumed that he had something further to say to us, and when I asked
him what he wanted to talk about, he gave this tantalizing reply:

"Curious?  Wait and see."  Then, after a pause, "I shall have other
work for my office force."

The explanation of this cryptic statement was not given until we had
completed the final revision of the story.  Before I reveal what he had
in mind, I wish to state that which is to me the most convincing proof
of the supernormal origin of the three stories that had been traced,
letter by letter, on our transmission board.  That they come through
Mrs. Hays, there can be no doubt whatever.  My total lack of psychic
power has been abundantly demonstrated.  Mrs. Hays has written much
light fiction; but it is necessary for her to write a story at one
sitting.  If it does not come "all in one piece" it is foredoomed to
failure.  I know nothing of Mark Twain's habits; but in all the work we
have done for him, the first draft has been rough and vigorous, and
sweeping changes have been made by him while the work was undergoing
revision.  In the case of "Jap Herron" some of the most important
changes were made without a rereading of the story, changes that
involved incidents which we had forgotten, and for which I was
compelled to search the original record.  When I had substituted these
passages for the ones they were to supplant, I made a typewritten copy
of the entire story and we read it aloud to Mark.  Mrs. Hays and I sat
with our finger tips on the planchette so that he could interrupt; but
he made only a few minor corrections.  The story had been virtually
rewritten twice, although a few of the chapters, as they now stand, are
exactly as they were transmitted, not so much as a word having been
changed.  The only change made in the fourteenth chapter came near the
end, where Mark had suggested a line of dashes or stars to bridge the
break between Jap's leaving his mother and the announcement that his
mother was dead.  Forty-eight words were dictated to show what Jap
actually did, in that painful interim, the three sentences being
rounded out by the words, "There, I think that sounds better."

Sometimes, in the course of the revision, we have been interrupted by
the jerkily traced words, "Try this," or "We'll fix that better," or "I
told Emily to take out those repetitions."  It has happened that he
used the same word four times in one paragraph, and in copying I have
substituted the obvious synonym.  Occasionally he did not approve of my
correction and would rebuke me sharply.  In the main he has expressed
himself as well pleased with the labor I have spared him.  On the 10th
of January, 1916, Mrs. Hays came to my home for a last reading of the
finished manuscript.  When she read it through, I asked her to sit at
the board with me.  There was something about which I wanted to
question Mark, and I did not wish her mind to interfere in any way with
the answer.  Mrs. Hays had had two curious psychic experiences in
connection with our work.  The first came to her when we were still at
work on "A Daughter of Mars."  It was in the form of a vivid dream in
which Mark Twain said to her, "Don't be discouraged, Lola.  All that we
have done in the past is just forging the hammer for the larger strokes
we are going to make."  The second was similar; but the man who
appeared to her was a stocky, bald-headed man in a frock coat.  When
she asked him who he was and what he wanted, he replied, "Mark Twain
sent me to call on you."

At this time, "Jap Herron" was being revised, and she supposed that
this man, with the striking personality, would be introduced somewhere.
However, the story was ended, and no such character had appeared.  I
wanted to know whether or not the dream was significant.  I said:

"Mark, did you ever send anybody to call on Lola?"  The planchette
replied:

"Yes, I sent him.  We will do another story.  We will wait until the
smoke of this one clears away.  I want Emily to have a rest, and many
other things will be adjusted.  I would like to have my old office
force.  It is to be a bigger book than this one--more important.  The
man I sent you was Brent Roberts."

We dropped our hands in amazement.  Brent Roberts appears twice in the
Jap Herron story.  He is not half so conspicuous as Holmes, the
saloon-keeper, or Hollins, the grocer.  In truth, we had scarcely
noticed him.  I asked:

"Mark, are you going to give a sequel to 'Jap Herron'?"  He said:

"No.  Brent Roberts had a story before he elected to spend his last
years in Bloomtown.  Now, girls, don't speculate.  I am taking care of
Brent Roberts."

He added that it was "up to Emily" to give his book to the world, and
that he intended to explore a little of the Uncharted Country while he
was waiting for his office force to resume work.  Once I asked him,
while he was transmitting "A Daughter of Mars," whether he had ever
visited that planet.  He replied:

"No, this is pure fiction.  I elected to return to earth.  I wanted to
take the taste of those memoirs out of my mouth."

One other passage from the early record may profitably precede the
actual story of Jap's coming.  We were in the midst of the most
critical revision.  My husband was commanded to read the story,
paragraph by paragraph.  When there was no comment, the planchette
remained motionless under our fingers, but there were few passages that
escaped some change.  Several times the changed wording conflicted with
something farther along in the story, and it was necessary to go back
and make another correction.  The revision sheets covered a big table,
and my husband found it very exasperating to make the corrections.  At
length Mark said:

"Smoke up and cool off, old boy.  Perhaps I should apologize.  The last
secretary I had used to wear an ice-soaked towel inside his head.  The
girls and old Mark together make a riffle.  Well, we will slow up.  In
my ambition, I have been too eager.  It is hard to explain how great a
thing is the power to project my mentality through the clods of
oblivion.  I have so long sought for an opening.  Be patient, please.
I am not carping.  I get Edwin's position.  We will be easy with the
new saddle, so the nag won't run away.  I heard Edwin's suggestion, and
it is a good one.  We will go straight through the story, beginning
where we left off to-night.  That was what I intended to do, but that
second chapter nipped me."

When next we met we had no thought of any other work than the revision
of the story on which we had been working at frequent intervals for
about two months.  We never knew whether a session at the board would
begin with a bit of personal conversation or a prolonged stretch of
dictation.  We held ourselves passive, ready to fall in with the humor
or whim of our astonishingly human though still intangible guest.  The
beginning of that evening's work--it was the 6th of September--was
almost too great an upheaval for me.  The planchette fairly raced as it
spelled the words:

"This story will have legitimate chapters.  Nosy nopsis.  Then
ameisjapherron.  Begin.  Asevery well-bred story has a hero, and as the
reseems better material in jap than in any other party to this story,
we will dignify him."

I wanted to stop, but my husband insisted that I make no break in the
impatient dictation.  He had perceived that the first string of letters
spelled the words, "No synopsis.  The name is Jap Herron," but I could
not see his copy, and to my mind the sentences spelled chaos.  A little
farther along I ventured an interruption, when we had transmitted the
sentence, "The folks in Happy Hollow continued to say Magnesia long
after she left its fragrant depths."  I had just spelled out the name,
Agnesia, and I was too deeply engrossed with the labor of following the
letters to even attempt to understand the meaning.  I turned to my
husband and said:

"It probably didn't intend to stop on that letter M," whereat the
planchette rebuked my stupidity thus: "Emily, they called her Magnesia."

After that, I contrived to get control of my nerves, and the rest of
the dictation was not so difficult.  When we had received the crisp
final sentence, "And stay he did," the planchette went right on with
this information, "This is the first copy of the first chapter.  There
will be 25 or more chapters.  This is enough for this time, as the
office force is a little weak.  But results ... very good.  We will
finish the other story and dip into this at the next session.  There
will be better speed in this, for there will be no revision until it is
finished.  We will work hard and fast.  Emily may meet folks she knows
in this tale, for she knows a town with a river and a Happy Hollow.  I
did not intend to start another story so soon, but other influences are
so strong that they may try to dominate the board.  This will not tire
you so much.  You must be determined not to permit intruders.  If they
are recognized, you will not be free of them again.  I am pushed aside.
Leave the board when they appear.  Good-bye."

The use of the name, Happy Hollow, forms a link with Hannibal; but if
any of the characters in "Jap Herron" were drawn from life, they must
have belonged to Mark Twain's generation and not to mine.  Mark never
seems to take into account the fact that he left Hannibal before I was
born, and that there have been many changes in the old town.  The
character of Jacky Herron may have been suggested by a disreputable
drunken fisherman whose experiences I have heard my father relate; but
there is one little touch in that first chapter that must have come
from Mark's own mind, since the underlying fact was not known to any of
us until we read Walter Prichard Eaton's article on birds' nests,
months later.  When we transmitted that statement, "The father of the
little Herrons was a kingfisher," none of us knew that the kingfisher's
home nest is a filthy hole, close to the river bank.  The application
is too perfect to have been accidental.

Before another chapter of the story was transmitted, I went to spend a
morning with Mrs. Hays.  At the request of her son, we consented to
allay his curiosity by a visible demonstration of the workings of the
mysterious board, of which he had necessarily heard much.  He hoped to
receive some definite communication from his father, or the sister who
had died in her girlhood; but this is what he recorded:

"Emily, I gave those synopses not for a guide but to prevent others
from imposing their ideas and confusing you.  It might be said that it
made it easier for you, but that idea is wrong.  It would be easier to
write the story direct.  You have learned that this was wise, because
constant efforts have been made to break in and alter the stories.  For
this reason I gave you the synopses, so that you could not be deceived.
Now I am going to trust you.  I intended to advise you that it would be
a more convincing psychic record, if you have nothing on which a
subconscious mind might be said to be working.  The synopsis was for
your protection, and has no value to the record.  At first you had such
a conglomerate method of working that it was necessary.  You did not
recognize the difficulties that were likely to occur.  You were apt to
employ temporary help, so eliminate."

Just what was meant by "temporary help" is not apparent; but there was
no opportunity to question him further, for at that moment we were
interrupted by the arrival of another luncheon guest and the board was
put aside.  We devoted two sessions to the revision and finishing
touches of the troublesome short story, and then we plunged into the
transmission of "Jap Herron" in deadly earnest.

As far as possible, we sat twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays.  We
usually worked uninterruptedly for two hours, with no sound save that
of my voice as I pronounced the letters and punctuation marks over
which the pointer of the planchette paused in its swift race across the
board.  My husband discovered early in the work that if he permitted
himself the luxury of a smile he was in danger of distracting Mrs.
Hays, who always sat facing him, and thus of bringing about confusion
in the record.  Under Mark's specific instruction she has schooled
herself to keep her mind as nearly blank as is possible for a woman who
is absolutely conscious and normal, and the evidence that something
humorous was being transmitted through her would be diverting, to say
the least.  As for my own part in the work, I seldom realized the
import of the sentences I had spelled out, my whole attention being
concentrated on the rapidly gliding pointer.  When my husband read
aloud the copy he had taken down it almost invariably came to Mrs. Hays
and me as something entirely new.

The story of Jap Herron, as it stands completed, does not follow the
original order of the first fifteen chapters.  The early part of the
tale was handled in a manner so sketchy and rapid in its action that
three whole chapters and seven fragments of chapters were dictated and
inserted after the work was finished.  In the original copy the second
chapter suffered little change up to the point of George Thomas's
advent, with the suggestion that he might bring in some more turnips.
Following the disaster to Judge Bowers's speech, Mark took a short cut
to pave the way for the next chapter.  It ran thus:

"But bad luck cannot camp on your trail forever.  In the gladsome
June-time, Ellis married Flossy Bowers, and her dowry of two thousand
dollars and her following of kin set the _Herald_ on its feet."

These two sentences were expanded into the more important half of the
third chapter, almost five months after they had been dictated, and
this without a rereading of the story.  At another time, when this
curious kind of revision was under way, Mark dictated the latter part
of the second chapter, wherein Ellis Hinton tells Jap how he happened
to be starving in Bloomtown.  When he had finished the dictation, with
the words, "My boy, that blue calico lady was Mrs. Kelly Jones," he
continued:

"Emily will know where to fit it in."

This fitting in was not extremely difficult, since there was only one
place in the story into which each of the inserted chapters or
fragments could be made to fit; but the original copy had to be read
several times before these thin places became apparent, and I got no
help whatever from Mark.  Once, when I implored him to tell me where a
certain brief but gripping paragraph belonged, he replied, "Emily, that
is your job.  I don't want the Hannibal girl to fall down on it."

On that second Monday night in September, when the "office force"
settled itself to serious work, my husband read to us the copy we had
transmitted.  The chapter ended with what is now the closing paragraph
of the third chapter:

"The _Herald_ put on a new dress, and the hell-box was dumped full of
the discarded, mutilated types that had so long given strabismus to the
patient readers of the Bloomtown _Herald_."

The diet of turnips and sorghum and the other humorous touches of the
narrative overwhelmed us with laughter, whereat the planchette under
our fingers wrote:

"Sounds like Mark, eh?"

I asked him if he was satisfied with the use of the word "_Herald_"
twice in that last sentence.  He replied:

"You must excuse me.  I am all in.  I told you I would leave minor
points to your pencil.  T-i-r-e-d.  Good-bye."

Our first acquaintance with Wat Harlow, as he appeared in the fourth
chapter, gave little promise of the character into which he was
destined to be developed.  To the three of us, who laughed over the
episode of the vermilion handbill, he appeared to be nothing more than
a third-rate country politician.  In the original transcription he
received only an occasional passing touch, until the death of Ellis
brought him forth in a new light.  We did not know then what Ellis had
meant by "that reformed auctioneer," for the story of Wat's connection
with the upbuilding of Bloomtown, as it is set forth in the sixth
chapter, was not told until we were well along with the work of
revision.

One of the most interesting personal touches, to be found only in our
private record, was introduced at the end of the fourth chapter.  It
had been a long stretch of dictation, and when the planchette stopped I
asked if there was any more.  The pointer gave only this, "No--30."
Having had no experience with printing offices, I was mystified until
my husband explained that "30 on the hook" means the end of a given
piece of work.

Mark once made use of the expression, "the story contains a great deal
of brevity that will have to be untied later on."  This untying process
is nowhere more aptly illustrated than in the fourth chapter of our
original copy, a brief chapter that contained the condensed material of
Wat Harlow's letter to Jap, the birth of little J.W. and Isabel
Granger's first kiss.  There was nothing about Bill's boyhood, no
record of Jap's home surroundings, none of the amusing details of the
printing office wherein Jap and Bill were learning their trade.  All
these incidents, which seem so essential to the story, were introduced
when the first draft of the story had been completed.  The seventh
chapter, which has to do with the babyhood of little J.W., was dictated
after the revision had apparently been completed.  When I asked Mark
why he inserted it, the planchette made this curious reply:

"I was thinking that we'd better soften the shock of the boy's death."

For us, through whom the story was being transmitted, there was no
softening of Ellis Hinton's death.  We knew from the foregoing chapter
that the country editor had gone to the mountains for his health, and
that Flossy had no hope; but when we had recorded the words: "Jap
closed the press upon the inky type, and gathered the great bunches of
fragrant blossoms and heaped them upon the press, to be forever
silent," a great wave of sadness swept over me, I knew not why.  The
action of the planchette was so rapid that I could not stop to think or
question.  It was as if the man dictating the story had an unpleasant
task before him, which he wished to have done with as soon as possible.
When the final words, "At rest.  FLOSSY," had been spelled out, and the
planchette stopped abruptly, Mrs. Hays cried:

"My God, what has happened!" and I looked up to see that she was very
white, and tears were slipping down her cheeks.

"Ellis is dead," my husband said, very simply.  He had foreseen the
end, had grasped the infinite pathos of that old Washington press,
decked as a funeral casket with the flowers that had been sent to usher
in the new regime.

When the evening's copy had been read, I asked Mark if he wished to
comment on it.

"Not to-night, Emily," the planchette spelled.  "I am all broken up.  I
didn't want Ellis to die.  I tried to figure a way to save him; but I
couldn't make it go."

When we met again, on the 2d of October, the dictation began with these
words:

"I want Edwin to go back to the beginning of the last chapter.  I left
out a sentence that is necessary.  It explains why Ellis left by rail.
You insert."

Then he dictated the passage relating to the new railroad and the
temporary station.  When he had finished he said, "Go on with the
story," and the next sentence began, "When Ellis went away it was to
the sound of jollity."  The reference to Robert Louis Stevenson was new
to both of us, and we have not sought to verify the incident.  That
Mark wanted it included in his story was sufficient for us.

That next chapter contained another accumulation of brevity which was
afterward untied.  The funeral, the reading of Ellis Hinton's will,
Judge Bowers's candidacy, the nomination of Jap Herron as the ugliest
man in Bloomtown, Bill's first spree and the local option fight, all
these were sketched with the sharpness and sudden transition of
pictures on a cinematograph screen.  The following chapter was almost
as tightly packed with incident, and in the midst of it there was a
break, with an astonishing explanation.  Three evenings in succession
we had had trouble with the planchette.  It had seemed to me that Mrs.
Hays was trying to pull it from beneath my fingers.  Meanwhile she had
mentally accused me of digital heaviness.  She uses the finger tips of
her left hand while I use my right.  As a rule our touch is so light
that the planchette glides automatically.  On these three evenings we
had left the board with cramped fingers, and a general sense of
dissatisfaction.  Several sentences that were plainly spurious were
afterward stricken from the record; but we had forgotten about the
other scribes who wanted "a pencil on earth," until Mark interrupted
the story to say:

"I must ask you to be wary and sharp to dismiss impostors.  Right now
there are more than twenty hands trying to control your dictation.  It
is very hard for me.  I am disconsolate, and powerless to help myself.
If we do not watch every avenue, our work is spoiled.  There has been a
constant struggle for my rights.  I only ask a little help, and you are
all my hope.  If you fail me, I am undone."

This illuminating outburst served to clear the atmosphere, and the
three chapters were afterward expanded into seven, much of the same
diction being reproduced.  It was as if Mark, knowing the difficulties
on his own side of the shadow-line, had tried to get at least the
outline of his story down on paper, lest he lose his hold entirely.
After that evening we had almost no trouble with intruders.

The story of Jones, of the Barton _Standard_, came to us like a thunder
clap from a cloudless sky, for the part which old Pee-Dee Jones played
in the development of Bloomtown and Barton was not related until we had
begun the work of revision.  In the original story of that near-fight,
Mark gave us a significant cross-light on the conditions under which he
lives.  The marshal had appeared in the office at the crucial moment,
as if he had dropped through the roof or arisen out of the floor.
Several times in the earlier part of the work the characters had thus
appeared without obvious means of locomotion, and I had called
attention to the inconsistency, with the result that Mark had dictated
a few words to show how or whence the new arrival had come.  When
Wilfred Jones shouted to the marshal, "I demand protection," my
husband, who was reading the evening's copy aloud to us, said:

"How does the marshal happen to be there?  I don't see any previous
mention of him."

Instantly the planchette, which we always kept in readiness under our
finger tips, began to move.  It dictated this:

"You might say, 'at that moment the town marshal, wearing his star
pinned to his blue flannel shirt, strolled in.'  I have been away from
the need of going up-stairs and down-stairs for so long that I forget
about it."

"How do you get from one place to another, Mark?" I asked.

"Now, Emily, curiosity!  But you know we haven't any Pullman cars or
elevators here.  When I want to be at a place where I am free to
go--why, I am there."

He took occasion, when our difficulties seemed to be at an end and his
grip on his "pencil" was once more firmly established, to make it very
plain to me that I alone was responsible for the annoyance we had had.
He put it thus:

"Things will be all right if you don't give way to any more curiosity.
In the beginning I told you that it would not do.  Emily wants to
investigate too much.  It must be one or all.  Edwin and I understand.
It was you that mixed the type.  Lola must be passive.  If she tries to
watch for intruders, she gets in my way.  So it is up to the Hannibal
girl."

I do not know, even now, how I could have prevented the trouble that
well-nigh wrecked our work.  It is true I had taken part in another
psychic demonstration, but it was in a remote part of the city and it
had nothing to do with Mark Twain's "pencil."  However, I took no
further chance with psychic investigation.

When Jap Herron was elected Mayor of Bloomtown, and the girl he loved
had walked right into his astonished arms, it seemed to us that the
story must be ended.  We had forgotten that Jap ever had a family of
his own, a mother and two sisters, and when the drunken hag reeled into
the _Herald_ office we were as greatly horrified as Jap himself was.  I
had put my husband's carefully kept copy into type-written form, and it
occurred to me to get the opinion of a master critic on the story, not
as evidence of the survival of the human mind after physical death, but
as pure fiction.  Acting upon the impulse, and without telling either
my husband or Mrs. Hays what I intended to do, I took the copy to
William Marion Reedy,[1] permitting him to infer that I had created it,
and asked him to tell me whether, in his judgment, the story was worth
finishing.  It was the beginning of the week, when the issuing of the
_Mirror_ consumed all his time, and while I was waiting for his verdict
we received three more chapters.  In the first of these we had a new
light on Isabel Granger's character, and came for the first time
absolutely to love Bill Bowers.  After that nothing that Bill might do
would shake our faith in his ability to make good in the end.  He might
be weak and foolish, but we understood why Jap believed in and loved
him.  We were jubilant when Rosy Raymond was eliminated from the game,
for we feared, whenever we permitted ourselves to speculate, that Bill
would marry her, and regret the step.  We assumed that the son of the
much-married Judge Bowers had inherited a nature sufficiently mobile to
recover from the shock of the silly girl's perfidy.

While this unexpected development of the story was being revealed to
us, William Marion Reedy sent me, in the envelope with the first ten
chapters of "Jap Herron," a criticism that fairly made me tingle with
delight.  Had the work been my own, I could not have been more pleased
with his unstinted praise.  I wanted to go to him at once and confess
the truth; but he was not in his office when I called.

Two of the succeeding chapters were taken down by friends who had been
let into the secret of our work and had asked permission to sit with
us.  It was the time of year when my husband could seldom spare an
evening from his work, and Mark consented to break into his beloved
office-force arrangement, for the sake of expediency.  Three men and
five women served us in the capacity of amanuenses while the latter
third of the book was being transmitted.  The first deviation from our
original arrangement came in connection with the dictation of the
seventeenth chapter, the chapter that ends with the death of Flossy and
her son.  We were three sympathetic women, and when the planchette had
traced the words, "It was a smile of heavenly beauty, as the pure soul
of Ellis Hinton's wife flew to join her loved ones," we three burst
simultaneously into violent weeping.  I have never experienced more
genuine grief at the grave of a departed friend or relative than I felt
when this woman, who had come to be more than human to me, was released
from her envelope of mortal clay.

The following day Mrs. Hays and I were invited to the home of a
delightful little Scotch woman who asked us to bring the planchette
board.  She knew nothing of the story, and had no intimation of the
personality on the other side who was sending it across, through our
planchette; nevertheless she was willing to keep copy for us.  The
chapter she wrote down is the eighteenth in the finished story, Jap's
funeral sermon and Isabel's song beside Flossy's coffin.  Even now I
cannot think of that scene without a swelling of the throat and a
blinding rush of tears.  It is needless to say we wept when the
dictation was ended.

When our hostess had read aloud the copy I asked our invisible
companion if he had anything more to say.  I avoided mentioning his
name, for we did not wish his identity disclosed.  The planchette
traced the curious words:

"You know that the air gets pretty damp for an old boy after this."

I looked out of the window.  It was a murky November afternoon, and I
asked, "Do you feel the dampness of the material atmosphere?"  Like a
flash came the reply:

"Emily, girl, you have been getting sob stuff."

Then I yearned to get my fingers in his shock of white hair, for I knew
Mark Twain was laughing at me.  But I had that which gave me
consolation, for I had brought with me Mr. Reedy's letter, analyzing
and commenting upon the story that Mark had created.  Incidentally Mrs.
Reedy had asked Mrs. Hays and me to come to her home the following day
to luncheon.  I had told her that Mrs. Hays possessed a high degree of
psychic power, and I consented to bring our board for a demonstration.
I wanted to see Mr. Reedy alone and explain to him that "Jap Herron"
had come to us over that insensate board, but opportunity was denied
me.  As soon as luncheon was over we went up to that beautiful yellow
room in which the best of _Reedy's Mirror_ is created, and Mrs. Hays
and I placed the board on our knees.  As soon as Mr. Reedy's fountain
pen was ready for action our planchette began:

"Well, I should doff my plaidie and don a kirtle, for 'tis not the
sands o' Dee but the wearing o' the green."  There was a wide sweep of
the planchette, and then, "'Tis not the shine of steel that always
reflects; but it is the claymore that cuts.  Both are made of steel and
both will mirror sometimes the shillalah.  Yet the shillalah is better
than the claymore, for the man that is cut will run; but if ye slug him
with the blackthorn he will have to listen.  This is just a flicker of
high light.  Bill jumped from bed as the rattle of the latch announced
the arrival of a visitor."

My heart thumped wildly for a moment, then sank.  I knew that the Bill
referred to was Bill Bowers, and not the editor whom hundreds delight
to call "Bill Reedy," and I knew, too, that it would be only a moment
until he must realize that the sentences he was writing down from my
dictation were part and parcel of the story whose first ten chapters he
had read and praised.  I dared not lift my eyes from the board, yet I
wanted to stop and explain that I had not intended to deceive him--that
I only wanted an unbiased opinion of Mark Twain's story.  In vain I
tried to stop the whirling planchette, my voice so husky that I could
scarcely pronounce the letters.  It went right on, with a situation
that neither Mrs. Hays nor I had anticipated.  We had schooled
ourselves not to speculate, yet the previous afternoon we had left Jap
in a fainting condition and on the verge of a long illness.  The
chapter we transmitted that day was the story of a gubernatorial
election in a small Missouri town.

Subsequently, when Mark gave us the intervening chapter, Jap's visit to
the cemetery and the humorous incidents of the campaign, I asked him:

"Why didn't you give this chapter last Thursday?"

"I thought that election would amuse Reedy.  Don't worry, Emily.  He
understood you.  He knows the Hannibal girl is honest," was the
comforting reply.

When the revision of the story was under way, and several fragments had
been dictated, the planchette spelled the words, "I want to add
something to the Reedy chapter," and without further ado it proceeded:
"The Bloomtown _Herald_ did itself proud that week."  That fragment was
the easiest of them all to fit into place.  At its conclusion we were
favored with a bit of pleasantry that seems significant.  My husband
gave us a lift whenever he could spare the time; but on this occasion a
woman friend was sitting with us.  She had written about two thousand
words of copy, when the tenor of the dictation changed suddenly to the
personal vein.

"Old Mark has been working like a badger, and is pleased with the
story.  The girls and friend Ed are going as well as Twain ever did
when he wielded his own pen.  When Edwin lights up a fresh smoke and
smiles, I know that all is well.  But when Lola frowns and Edwin
forgets to smoke, look out for leaks.  The story has sprung and therain
was hesitthininspots." The last of the sentence came so rapidly that
none of us had any idea what it meant, or that it meant anything at
all.  Before we had separated it into the words, "the rain washes it
thin in spots," I asked that that last part be repeated.  Instead we
got the words:

"When a board is sprung, it lets in rain.  It is Emily who has to hold
the drip pan for the temperamental ones."

"Thank you for those few kind words, Mark," I said.  "But if you think
enough of me to trust me with this important work, why do you single me
out for all the scoldings, when Edwin and Lola sometimes deserve at
least a share in your displeasure?"

"Whist, Hannibal girl, we know our office force," was the humorous
rejoinder.

The appearance of Agnesia was one of the keen surprises of the story,
and before we realized what Jap's little sister would mean to
Bloomtown, Mark interrupted his dictation with the words, "Stop!
Girls, the yarn is nearly all unwound.  We will skip a bit that we will
tie in later.  But now--Bill sat doubled over the case, the stick held
listlessly in his hand.  Nervously he fingered the copy, not knowing
what he was reading."

Without a break, we received the brief final chapter, ending with the
words, "Isabel wants to call him Jasper William."  The planchette
added, "The End."  We transmitted no more that day, although we knew
that our story was far from completion.

The next time we met we had another surprise in the coming of Jap's
elder sister.  When the twenty-fifth chapter was finished, Mark said:

"Girls, I think the story is done."

"It's pretty short for a book," I protested.  By way of reply, he gave
this:

"Did you ever know about my prize joke?  One day I went to church,
heard a missionary sermon, was carried away--to the extent of a hundred
dollars.  The preacher kept talking.  I reduced my ante to fifty
dollars.  He talked on.  I came down to twenty-five, to ten, to five,
and after he had said all that he had in him, I stole a nickel from the
basket.  Reason for yourselves.  Not how long but how strong.  Yet I
have a sneaking wish to tell you something of the early days of Ellis's
work, especially about Granger and Blanke.  But to-day I have writer's
cramp.  So let's get together soon and make the finish complete."

There were two more sessions, with the dictation of a whole chapter and
several fragments, at each meeting, and we met no more until I had put
the whole complex record into consecutive form.  We had a final review
of the work, and a few minor changes in words and phrases were made.
Mark expressed himself as well pleased, and as a little farewell he
gave us this, which has nothing to do with Jap Herron:

"There will be a great understanding some day.  It will come when the
earth realizes that we must leave it, to live, and when it can put
itself in touch with the heavens that surround it.  I have met a number
of preachers over here who would like to undo many things they
promulgated while they had a whack at sinners.

"There are hardshell Baptists who have a happy time meeting their
members, to whom they preached hell and brimstone.  They have many
things to explain.  There is one melancholy Presbyterian who frankly
stated the fact--underscore 'fact'--that there were infants in hell not
an ell long.  He has cleared out quite a space in hell since he woke
up.  He doesn't rush out to meet his congregation.  It would create
trouble and be embarrassing if they looked around for the suffering
infants.  As I said before, there is everything to learn, after the
shackles of earth are thrown aside.  I would like to write a story
about some of these preachers, and the mistakes they made, when the
doctrines of brimstone and everlasting punishment were ladled out as
freely to the little maid who danced as to the harlot.  It showed a
mind asleep to the undiscovered country."

"Can you shed any light on that undiscovered country?" I asked him.

"Perhaps.  But for the present there is enough of the truth of life and
death in 'Jap Herron' to hold you."

And with that he told us good-bye.

EMILY GRANT HUTCHINGS.



[1] William Marion Reedy, Editor and Publisher of _Reedy's Mirror_, a
weekly journal published in St. Louis, has long been interested in
psychic phenomena, as a source of exotic and unusual literature.  He
has also discovered and developed much purely terrestrial literary
talent, having brought out some of the best poets and fiction writers
of present-day America.  As a critic, he is a recognized master.




JAP HERRON

CHAPTER I

As every well-bred story has a hero, and as there seems better material
in Jap than any other party to this story, we will dignify him.  Mary
Herron feebly asserted her rights in the children by naming them
respectively, Fanny Maud, Jasper James and Agnesia.  Jasper
deteriorated.  He became Jap, and Jap he remained, despite the fact
that Fanny Maud developed into Fannye Maude and Agnesia changed her
cognomen, without recourse to law, to Mabelle.  The folks in Happy
Hollow continued to say "Magnesia" long after she left its fragrant
depths.

The father of the little Herrons was a kingfisher.  He spent his hours
of toil on the river bank and his hours of ease in Mike's place.  One
Friday, good luck peered through the dingy windows of the little shanty
where the Herrons starved, froze or sweltered.  It was Friday, as I
remarked before.  Mary was washing, against difficulties.  It had
rained for a week.  The clothes had to dry before Mary could cash her
labor, and it fretted Jacky Herron sorely.  His credit had lost caste
with Mike, and Mike had the grip on the town.  He had the only thirst
parlor in Happy Hollow.  So Jacky smashed the only remaining window,
broke the family cup, and set forth defiantly in the rain.  And in the
fog and slashing rain he lost his footing, and fell into the river.  As
it was Friday, Mary had hopefully declared that luck would change--and
it did!

The town buried Jacky and moved his family into decent lodgings,
because the Town Fathers did not want to contract typhoid in
ministering to them.  Loosed of the incubus of a father, the little
family grew in grace.  Jappie, as his baby sister called him, was the
problem.  Agnesia was pretty, and the Mayor's wife adopted her.  Fanny
Maud went west to live with her aunt, and Jap remained with his mother
until she, after the manner of womankind, who never know when they have
had luck, married another bum and began supporting him.  Jap ran away.

He was twelve years old, red-headed, freckled and lanky, when he
trailed into Bloomtown.  He loafed along the main street until he
reached the printing office, and there he stopped.  An aphorism of his
late lamented dad occurred to him.

"Ef I had a grain of gumption," said dad, during an enforced session of
his family's society, "I would 'a' went to work in my daddy's printin'
office, instid of runnin' away when I was ten year old.  I might 'a'
had money, aplenty, 'stid of bein' cumbered and helt down by you and
these brats."

Jap straggled irregularly inside and heard the old Washington hand
press groan and grunt its weary way through the weekly edition of the
_Herald_.  After the last damp sheet had been detached from the press,
and the papers were being folded by the weary-eyed, inky demon who had
manipulated the handle, he slouched forward.

"Say, Mister," he asked confidently, "do you do that every day?"
indicating the press, "'cause I'm goin' to work for you."

The editor, pressman and janitor looked upon him in surprise and pity.

"I appreciate your ambition," he said, more in sorrow than anger, "but
I have become so attuned to starving alone that I don't think I could
adjust myself to the shock of breaking my fast on you."

Jap was unmoved.

"My dad onct thought he'd be a editor, but he got married," he said
calmly.

"Sensible dad," commented the editor, with more truth than he dreamed.
"I suppose that he had three meals a day, and a change of socks on
Sunday."

"But Ma had to get 'em," argued Jap.  "I want to be a editor, and I am
agoin' to stay."  And stay he did.




CHAPTER II

"Run out and get a box of sardines," ordered the boss of the Washington
press.  "I've got a nickel.  I can't let you starve.  I lived three
months on them--look at me!"

Jap surveyed him apprehensively.

"I'd hate to be so thin," he complained, "and I don't like sardines nor
any fishes.  My dad fed us them every day.  Allus wanted to taste
doughnuts.  Can I buy them?"

Ellis Hinton laughed shortly, and spun the nickel across the imposing
stone.  Jap caught it deftly.  An hour later he appeared for work,
smiling cheerfully.

"Why the shiner?" queried Ellis, indicating a badly swollen and rapidly
discoloring eye.

"Kid called me red-top," said Jap bluntly.

"Love o' gracious," Ellis exclaimed, "what is the shade?"

"It's red," quoth Jap, "but it ain't his business.  If I am agoin' to
be a editor, nobody's goin' to get familiar with me."

This was Jap's philosophy, and in less than a week he had mixed with
every youth of fighting age in town.  The office took on metropolitan
airs because of the rush of indignant parents who thronged its portals.
Ellis pacified some of the mothers, outtalked part of the fathers and
thrashed the remainder.  After he had mussed the outer office with
"Judge" Bowers, and tipped the case over with the final effort that
threw him, Jap said, solemnly surveying the wreck:

"If I had a dad like you, I'd 'a' been the President some day."

Ellis gazed ruefully into the mess of pi, and kicked absently at the
hell-box.

"I'll work all night," cried Jap eagerly.  "I'll clean it up."

"We'll have plenty of time," said Ellis gloomily.  "We have to hit the
road, kid.  Judge Bowers owns the place.  He has promised to set us out
before morning."

But luck came with Jap.  It was Friday again, and Bowers's wife
presented him with twins, his mother-in-law arrived, and his uncle
inherited a farm.  There was only one way for the news to be
disseminated, and he came in with his truculent son and helped clean
up, so that the _Herald_ could be issued on time.  More than that, he
made the boys shake hands, and concluded to put Bill to work in the
_Herald_ office.  After he had puffed noisily out, Ellis looked
whimsically at Bill.

"Are you going to board yourself out of what I am able to pay you?" he
asked.

"Oh, I don't reckon Pappy cares about that," the boy said cheerfully.
"He just wants to keep me out of mischief, and he said that lookin' at
you was enough to sober a sot."

Months dragged by.  Bill and Jap worked more or less harmoniously.
Once a day they fought; but it was fast becoming a mere function, kept
up just for form.  Ellis was doing better.  He had set up housekeeping,
since Jap came, in the back room of the little wooden structure that
faced the Public Square, and housewives sent them real food once in a
while.

Once Ellis feared that Jap was going to quit him for the Golden Shore.
It was on the occasion of Myrtilla Botts's wedding, when she baked the
cakes herself, for practice, and her mother thoughtfully sent most of
them to the Editor, to insure a big puff for Myrtilla.  Ellis was
afraid; but Jap, with the enthusiasm and inexperience of youth, took a
chance.  Bill was laid up with mumps, or the danger would have been
lessened.  As it was, it took all the doctors in town to keep Jap alive
until they could uncurl him and straighten out his appendix, which
appeared to be cased in wedding cake.  This experience gave Jap an
added distaste for the state of matrimony.

"My dad allus said to keep away from marryin'," he moaned.  "But how'd
I know you'd ketch it from the eatin's?"

The subscription list grew apace.  There was a load of section ties,
two bushel of turnips and six pumpkins paid in November.  Bill and Jap
went hunting once a week, so the larder grew beyond sardines.  Jap
acquired a hatred of turnips and pumpkins that was in after years
almost a mania.  At Christmas, Kelly Jones brought in a barrel of
sorghum, "to sweeten 'em," he guffawed.  Jap had grown to manhood
before he wholly forgave that pleasantry.  It was a hard winter.
Everybody said so, and when Jap gazed at Ellis across the turnips and
sorghum of those weary months, he said he believed it.

"Shame on you," rebuked Ellis, gulping his turnips with haste.  "Think
of the wretched people who would be glad to get this food."

"Do you know any of their addresses?" asked Jap abruptly.  "Because I
can't imagine anybody happy on turnips and sorghum.  I'd be willin' to
trade my wretched for theirn."

Kelly said that Jap would be fat as butter if he ate plenty of
molasses, and this helped at first; but when the grass came, he begged
Ellis to cook it for a change.

When George Thomas came in, one blustery March day, to say that if the
turnips were all gone, he would bring in some more, Ellis pied Judge
Bowers's speech on the duties of the Village Fathers to the alleys,
when he saw the malignant look that Jap cast upon the cheery farmer.

Once a week Bill and Jap drew straws to determine which one should fare
forth in quest of funds, and for the first time in his brief business
career, Jap was glad the depressing task had fallen to him.  "Pi" was
likely to bring on an acute attack of mental indigestion, and the boy
had learned to dread Ellis Hinton's infrequent but illuminating flame
of wrath.

The catastrophe had been blotted out, the last stickful of type had
been set and Bill had gone home to supper when Jap, leg-weary and
discouraged, wandered into the office.  Ellis looked up from the form
he was adjusting.

"How did you ever pick out this town?" the boy complained, turning the
result of his day's collection on the table.

Ellis turned from the bit of pine he was whittling, a makeshift
depressingly familiar to the country editor.  He scanned the meager
assortment of coins with anxious eye.  Jap's lower jaw dropped.

"I'll have to fire you if you haven't got enough to pay for the paper."

"Got enough for that," said Jap mournfully, "but not enough for meat."

"Didn't Loghman owe for his ad?" Ellis demanded.  "Did you ask him for
it?"

"Says you owe him more 'n he's willin' for you to owe," Jap ventured.

Ellis sighed.

"Meat's not healthy this damp weather," he suggested.  "Cook something
light."

"It'll be darned light," said Jap.  "There's one tater."

"No bread?" asked Ellis.

"Give that scrap to the cat," Jap returned, "Doc Hall says she's done
eat all the mice in town and if we don't feed her she'll be eatin'
off'n the subscribers."

"Confound Doc Hall," stormed Ellis.  "You take your orders from me.
That bread, stewed with potato, would have made a dandy dish."  He
shook the form to settle it, and faced Jap.

"How did I come to pick this place?" he said slowly.  "Well, Jap, it
was the dirtiest deal a boy ever got.  I had a little money after my
father died.  I wanted to invest it in a newspaper, somewhere in the
West, where the world was honest and young.  I had served my
apprenticeship in a dingy, narrow little New England office, and I
thought my lifework was cut out for me.  I had big dreams, Jap.  I saw
myself a power in my town.  With straw and mud I wanted to build a town
of brick and stone.  Dreams, dreams, Jap, dreams.  Some day you may
have them, too."

He let his lean form slowly down into a chair.  Jap braced himself
against the table as the narrative continued:

"In Hartford I met Hallam, the man who started the Bloomtown _Herald_.
I heard his flattering version.  I inspected his subscription list and
studied the columns of his paper, full of ads.  I bought.  The subs
were deadheads, the ads--gratuitous, for my undoing.  It was indeed
straw and mud, and, lad, it has remained straw and mud."  He leaned his
head on his hand for a moment.

"That was the year after you were born, Jap.  I was only twenty-one.
For a year I was hopeful; then I dragged like a dead dog.  You will be
surprised when I tell you what brought me to life again.  I tell you
this, boy, so that you will never despise Opportunity, though she may
wear blue calico, as mine did.

"It was one dark, cold day.  No human face had come inside the office
for a week.  That was the period of my life when I learned how human a
cat can be.  We were starving, the cat and me, with the advantage in
favor of the cat.  She could eat vermin.  I sat by the table, wondering
the quickest way to get out of it.  Yes, Jap, the first and, God help
me, the only time that life was worthless.  The door opened and a plump
woman dressed in blue calico, a sunbonnet pushed back from her smiling
face, entered."

To Jap, who listened with his heart in his throat, it seemed that Ellis
was quoting perhaps a page from the memoirs he had written for the
benefit of his townsmen.  His deep, melodious voice fell into the
rhythmic cadence of a reader, as he continued:

"'Howdy, Mr. Editor,' she chirped.  'I've been keenin' for a long time
to come in to see you.  I think you are aprintin' the finest paper I
ever seen.  I brought you a mess of sassage and a passel of bones from
the killin'.  It's so cold, they'll keep a spell.  And here's a dollar
for next year's paper.  I don't want to miss a number.  I am areadin'
it over and over.  Seems like you are agoin' to make a real town out of
Bloomtown,' and with a friendly pat on the arm, she was gone."

Ellis brushed the long hair from his brow, the strange modulation went
out of his voice and the fire returned to his brown eyes as he said:

"Jap, I got up from that table and fell on my knees, and right there I
determined that starvation nor cold nor any other enemy should rout me.
Jap, I am going to make Bloomtown a real town yet.  My boy, that blue
calico lady was Mrs. Kelly Jones."




CHAPTER III

Ellis scowled and kicked his stool absently with his heels.

"Will you explain where the colons and semicolons have emigrated to?"
he asked Bill, with suppressed wrath.

"We was short of quads, and I whittled 'em off."

Ellis glared at Bill's ingenuous face.

"And what, pray, did you whittle to take their place?"

"Never had no call to use 'em," muttered Bill, chewing up the item he
had just disposed of.  "I can say all that I can think with commas and
periods."

"Abraham Lincoln used colons and semicolons," said Ellis, shortly, "and
I am setting his immortal speech.  What am I going to do about it, my
intelligent co-printer?"

Bill coughed violently as the wad of paper slipped down his throat.

"Try George Washington," he advised,  "They didn't have so much
trimmin's to their talk them days."

Jap shoved a chair against the door sill and flung the door ajar to cut
off the blast of hot air that swept the office.

"Gee-whiz!" he complained, "I'm chokin' on the dust.  However did they
get 'Bloomtown' hitched on to this patch of dirt?  There ain't a flower
'in a mile, 'ceptin' the half-dead sprigs the wimmin are acoaxin'
against their will."

"When I came here," said Ellis, "the old settlers told me that whenever
I wanted information I should hunt up Kelly Jones.  There he goes now.
Call him in."

But Kelly was coming anyway.  He carried a mysterious basket and his
sun-burned face was full of suppressed excitement.

"Wife allowed that you and Jap must be putty nigh starved," he
chuckled, shifting the quid to his other cheek.  "I reckon she knowed
that Jap done the cookin' Wednesdays and Thursdays."

He lifted the clean white towel from the basket, disclosing a pound of
yellow butter, a glass of jelly, a loaf of bread and two pies, fairly
reeking aroma.

"Fu'st blackberries," asserted Kelly.  "I ain't had a pie myself yet,
and wife forbid me to take a bite o' yourn."

"God bless the wife of our countryman, Kelly Jones.  May her shade
never grow less," said Ellis fervently, stowing the basket away.  "If
Jap and Bill stick all the matter on the hooks before noon, they may
have pie.  Otherwise the Editor of the _Herald_ exercises his
prerogative and eats both pies."

"Kelly," asked Jap abruptly, "why did they call this patch of dust
'Bloomtown'?  Did they ever have even peppergrass growin' along its
edges?"

Kelly settled himself comfortably in Ellis's chair and draped his long
legs over the exchanges.  Filling his mouth with Granger twist, he said:

"'Twa'n't because of the blooms.  Fact is, it never was 'bloom' in the
fu'st place.  Old man Blome owned this track of land--his name was
Jerusalem Blome.  Folks used to say Jerusalem Blown.  Purty nice story
there is about this town and Barton, why neither of 'em has got a
railroad, and why Barton is bigger in money and scarcer in folks."

Ellis put his stickful of type on the case resignedly.  Bill and Jap
deposited their weary frames on the doorstep.  The hot wind blew in
their faces, laden with dust.  The smell of dried grass was odorous.

"Looks like it mout blow up a rain," said Kelly, sniffing approvingly.

"Well, Kelly," declared Ellis, "you have tied the wheels of this
machine.  Deliver the goods you promised.  We are not interested in
rain."

"Humph!" ruminated Kelly, "it was this-a-way: Old man Blome bought this
track about the time that Luellen Barton moved to her plantation.  It
mout 'a' been sooner; I ain't sure.  Barton--leastways, what is Barton
now--belonged to old Simpson Barton.  When he went south and married a
rip-snortin' widow, he brought his wife and a passel o' niggers to live
at the old home place.  There hadn't never been no niggers there, along
of the fu'st Mis' Barton.

"When war broke out the niggers run away, along of Jerusalem Blome,
that got up a nigger regimint.  After the war there was talk of a
railroad.  It would run right through the Blome farm and cross the
Barton place crossways.  My daddy was overseer for Mis' Barton.  Simp
didn't have nothin' to say about the runnin' of the place.  I was a
tyke, doin' errands for everybody, and I heerd a lot o' the railroad
talk.  Old Blome was sellin' his farm in town lots, gettin' ready for
the boom--for who would 'a' thought that Mis' Barton would turn her
back on such a proposition?

"You see, it was this-a-way: Mis' Luellen was allus speculatin' in
niggers, and a month before war broke, she had bought a load of Guinea
niggers--the kind that looks like they are awearin' bustles, you know.
Simp kinder smelt war, but, Lordee, Luellen wouldn't be dictated to!
And she went broke, flat as a flitter.  All that was left was the
thousand acres of Barton land.

"Railroad?  No, siree!  She heard about old man Blome's activity, and
she had it in for Blome.  She sat up and primped her lips when Pee-Dee
Jones come in behalf of the railroad.  That's how the Barton Joneses
come to settle in this neck o' the woods.  Pee-Dee Jones--no kin o'
mine--had a winnin' way, and he purty nigh got Mis' Luellen's name on
the paper, when he let slip that he intended buildin' a town on her
land.  'Do you think that I am agoin' to have a lot of blue-bellied
Yankees in my very dooryard?' she yelled.  'You are mistaken.'  And so
she stuck.

"Afterwards she learned that Pee-Dee Jones had follered Grant.  Whew!
She nigh busted with rage.  Mis' Luellen allus said that she could
smell a Yankee a mile, and as she didn't like the smell, she cropped
the railroad boom.  It went five mile north of her place, and missed
Bloomtown twenty mile.  That's why the two towns are just livin' along.
The folks that bought lots of old Blome tried to get another railroad
to come their way.  That was when the Wabash looked like it was headed
for my farm; but I reckon that opportunities like that don't come but
onct in a lifetime.

"I wonder that Mis' Luellen's spook don't howl around Barton every
night, for Jones bought the big house after she died, and the fambly
comes back there to live whenever their luck goes wrong.  Pee-Dee's
boy, Brons Jones, started a paper there, about the time that Hallam
started the Bloomtown _Herald_.  He sold out to a poor devil that's
racin' to see if he can starve quicker'n Ellis.  Brons ain't been
around these parts, the last few years, but he owns a lot o' Barton
property that he thinks 'll make good some day."

Kelly aimed a clear stream of tobacco juice at the dingy brown
cuspidor, and made as if to settle himself for further narrative.

"Jap, Bill, get to work," commanded Ellis.  "And, Kelly, much as I
appreciate you and your excellent wife, I must dispense with your
society.  I need these boys."

As the farmer departed, grinning cheerfully, Tom Granger appeared at
the door of the _Herald_ office.  A conference of prominent citizens
had been summoned to meet, early that afternoon, in the Granger and
Harlow bank, a somewhat more pretentious building, separated from the
_Herald_ office by a narrow alley; and during a lull in the morning's
business Tom was serving himself in the capacity of errand boy.  From
his place on the front steps, he could watch for the possible advent of
depositor or daylight robber, there being no rear door to the bank.

"You'll be on hand, Ellis," he reminded.  "Couldn't have any kind of a
meeting without the _Herald_, you know.  We won't keep you long."

But the session was more important than the banker had anticipated.
Judge Bowers had prepared a lengthy discourse, and others had opinions
that needed ventilating.  Once or twice, Ellis was irritated by shrieks
of laughter that emanated from the office across the alley, usually in
Bill's shrill treble.  When the cause of the merriment had reached an
exceptional climax, the Editor pounced upon his assistants, wearing the
scowl of a thunder god.  Jap and Bill got up, shamefacedly, as he
demanded:

"What do you think I am conducting this plant for?  A circus for
horse-play?"

He kicked the cat loose from the box Jap had it hitched to.  The two
boys looked ruefully at their over-turned cart.

"There goes the hell-box!" Bill screamed.

Ellis stared at him in transfixed wrath.

"Was that pi?" he demanded, looking down the hole in the floor into
which most of the contents of the box had spilled.

Bill darted into the back room and sneaked swiftly out through the
alley door.  The office saw him no more that day.  With such tools as
were available, Jap set to work to undo the mischief he had wrought.
An hour later, he replaced the plank in the floor.  The rescued type
was piled in a dirty litter of refuse.  Ellis leaned over it, attracted
by a gleam that shone as not even new type could glitter.

"It's a ring," explained Jap, furtively.  "I reckon you won't be so mad
now.  I can soak it when we get hungry.  I soaked my ma's ring, lots of
times."

"Why, you young reprobate!" exclaimed Ellis, "that ring is not yours,
or mine.  We will advertise it."  He smiled in Jap's disappointed face.
"It looked like a beefsteak, didn't it, boy?  Well, virtue is its own
reward, and maybe the owner will pay for the ad."

But she did not, and yet the kick given to the inoffensive office cat
had effects as far-reaching in the result to Bloomtown as did the kick
of the famous Chicago cow, with this difference, that the effects were
not disastrous.  The brief ad in the _Herald_ brought Flossy Bowers
from her home in Barton to claim a ring she had lost fifteen years
before.

"The office used to belong to Pap's daddy," Bill explained to Jap, as
Ellis and Miss Bowers stood chatting in the front door.  "When Grandpap
was lawyerin', he had this for his office, and Aunt Flossy lost her
ring, scrubbin' the floor.  I have heard tell that he made the wimmin
folks curry the horses.  They say he had a big funeral.  I wonder--"
Bill spoke wistfully, "I wonder if I have any kinfolks on the man-side
that love anybody but theirselves.  Flossy didn't get to go off to
school till her daddy died.  She's been teaching up to Barton, since my
pappy married this last time, and my stepmother don't like her, so she
never comes home."

Jap and Bill noted that Ellis found frequent business in Barton, and
despite the inhospitable atmosphere of the substantial Bowers home,
across the little park from the _Herald_ office, Flossy came oftener
than usual to her girlhood town.  The autumn, the winter and the spring
sped by.  Ellis Hinton was too happy to scold, even when there was an
excess of horse-play.  In the gladsome June-tide the young girls of
Bloomtown stripped their mothers' gardens to weave garlands for the
little church, and Judge Bowers opened his heart and his house for the
wedding reception.

Flossy had a dower of two thousand dollars, besides the cottage, a part
of her father's patrimony, on one of the side streets, a ten-minute
walk from the office.  In her trunk were stowed away the yellow linens
that should have served her, had a certain college friend proved
faithful, and the wedding presents came near to doing the rest.  This
strange turn of the wheel of fortune landed Jap Herron in his first
real home.  Flossy could cook, and thank the kind fates, she brought
something to cook with her.  Flossy was a misnomer, for even in her
salad days, she had never been the least bit "flossy," and when Ellis
bestowed himself upon her she had well turned thirty.

The Judge made Ellis a present of the office, thereby relieving him of
the haunting fear that he might, at some time, demand the rent.  The
paper put on a new dress, and the hell-box was dumped full of the
discarded, mutilated types that had so long given strabismus to the
patient readers of the Bloomtown _Herald_.




CHAPTER IV

"To-morrow is Jap's birthday," announced Ellis, one noontide early in
July.  "Jap, you are a joy-spoiler.  With the Fourth yet smoking in the
air, we must be upset by your birthday."

"Dad allus cussed that day," remarked Jap, wiping the blackberry juice
from his freckled face.  "Gee, I never guessed that there was such grub
as this," regretfully gazing at the generous blackberry
cobbler--regretfully, because his exhausted stomach refused to give
another stitch.

"Cussed it?" queried Ellis, who was beginning to fat up a bit.

"He said that I was the first nail in the coffin of his troubles,"
replied Jap cheerfully.

"How dreadfully inhuman," exclaimed Flossy, scraping the scraps to the
chickens.  "Well, Jappie," she bustled back to the dining-room where
her little family lingered, "we are going to begin making your
birthdays pleasant.  What do you want most?"

She had her mind's eye on the discarded ties of gorgeous hue, bought
while Ellis was courting, and still brand new.

"Ca-can I have just what I want?" stuttered Jap, excitedly.

"Why, certainly, Jappie.  That is, if we can afford it."

"Well--well," floundered Jap, astounded at his own temerity, "I allus
wanted a pair of knee pants.  Ma thought that some time she could get
'em; but the folks that she washed for allus kept giving her pants of
their menfolks.  I had to wear 'em.  Can I have knee pants?"

Flossy stared dazedly after Ellis, whose vision of Jap in knee trousers
was most unsettling.  Before the momentous request had been granted, he
was already half way down the alley.  He was still convulsed with
laughter when he reached the side door of the _Herald_ office.  But his
mental picture paled into dull commonplace, by comparison with the
reality that was in store for him.

Jap bought the cherished pants!

Bloomtown had seen the circus, the Methodist church fire and Judge
Lesley's funeral, the greatest in the history of the county; but none
of these created the interest that Jap brought out when he traveled the
length of Spring street, rounded the corner at Blanke's drug store and
walked solemnly along Main street to the office.

Ellis was looking out of the window when he appeared, and despite his
effort at composure, was writhing on the floor in agony when Jap
entered.  Bill looked up, as the vision crossed the threshold, and he
involuntarily swallowed four type he was holding in his lips while he
adjusted a pied stickful of "More Anon's" communication from Pluffot.
Jap was so interested in himself that these things passed him by.  He
sat solemnly on his stool and looked vacantly into the e-box.  Poking
absently among the dusty types, he said, with profound solemnity:

"Bill, did you ever want anything right bad?"

Bill swallowed the last type with difficulty.  It was the last capital
Z, and they were getting five dollars for the announcement of Zachariah
Zigler's daughter, Zella Zena's graduation into matrimony, and Bill had
been picking enough Z's out of the "More Anon" to spell it, when the pi
happened.  His mind feebly recognized the calamity.  He stared at the
apparition before him, too stunned by the catastrophe to apprehend
Jap's appearance further.  Jap pressed him for reply.

"Once," he admitted gloomily.  "I wanted to eat musherroons."

"Did you like 'em--when you got them?" asked Jap wanly.

"Naw!  Tasted nasty.  Never could see why folks keened after 'em."

Jap sighed.

"I allus wanted knee pants," he said plaintively.  "But seems like I
wa'n't made for that kind of luxury.  I ain't a bit happy, like I
thought.  Seems kind of indecent to show your legs, when you never done
it before."

And Jap donned his long trousers again, much to the relief of
Bloomtown.  Ellis afterward declared that the three-and-a-half feet of
spindling legs that dangled along under the buckled bands of those
short trousers were the most remarkable things he had ever seen.  They
resembled nothing more than the legs of a spring lamb, cavorting in
knee pants, in the butcher's window.

When we have achieved our heart's desire, we often taste the ashes of
illusion.

Jap did not worry further about his appearance, but, dressed in the
neat jumpers that Flossy provided, he seemed content.  The memory of
the episode was beginning to lose some of its sting when Dame Fortune
gave a mighty turn to her wheel.  He was in the alley with Bill,
playing marbles, when Wat Harlow came rushing out.

"Where is Ellis?" he gasped.  "There's hell afloat."

"Ellis and Flossy have gone to Birdtown to stay till Monday,"
vouchsafed Bill.  "It's goin' to be big doin's at an anniversary,
Sunday."

"Good God!" cried Wat, "what can I do?"

Jap arose and dusted himself.

"Is it a dark secret?" he inquired.  "Did Ellis owe you a bill?
Lordee, man, you can find plenty more in your fix.  Forget it."

Wat continued to tear up and down the narrow alley.

"I'm ruined," he groaned.  "They've got an infernal lie out about me,
and it's going to kill me out."

Jap was interested.

"Maybe I know what Ellis could do," he suggested.

"I am running for the Legislature again," Wat said, pacing wildly over
the marbles.  "The Morgan crowd have got it out that I sold myself to
the crowd that are trying to lobby a bill for a big appropriation for
the State University.  The county is solid against it, and they will
vote me out of politics forever."

"What could Ellis do?" asked Jap, sympathetically.

"I thought that he could print the truth in handbills that could be
sent out.  It is now Friday, and Tuesday is election day.  There will
be no chance for help after Monday.  They would have to have time to
get all over the county."  He sat down and wiped his forehead.

"What is your defense?" asked Jap judicially.

"They said that I was in the headquarters of the University gang--and I
was," he said bitterly.  "They said I shook hands with Barks--and I
did.  They said that he walked with me down the steps, with his arm
around my shoulder--and he did."

"Love of Mike!" exploded Bill, "What do you want to talk about it for,
then?"

"The University headquarters are in Bolton's furniture store,"
explained Wat.  "My--my baby died last night, and I went there for her
little coffin."  He choked and walked over to the gate.  After a moment
he turned back.  "Barks was there.  When he found why I came, he walked
out with me.  He put his arm around my shoulder.  He--he was telling me
that he buried his youngest, a few weeks ago.  And now, while I am tied
here, and the time is so short, Ellis is gone.  And I'll be ruined!"

He leaned heavily on the rickety gate.  Bill wiped his snub nose,
openly, but Jap straightened up.  The fire of battle was in his eyes.

"Come inside," he cried valiantly.  "Ellis is gone, but the office is
here.  Come on, Bill.  We have great things to do."

All night long the two boys labored.  After the story was in type, they
printed it on the Washington press.  It was Bill's suggestion that
brought forth a can of vermilion, to lend color to the heart story.
Wat was in and out all night, but there was no "in and out" for the
boys.  At daybreak they flung the last handbill upon the stack of bills
and sank exhausted upon them.  Wat carried a mail pouch full of them to
the stage that started on its daily trip to Faber, at seven o'clock,
and the pathetic story saved the day for Legislator Harlow.

"Boys, I will never forget it," he declared.

Ellis saw one of the badly spelled, ink-smeared agonies on Saturday
evening, and took the next stage for home, wrathful enough to thrash
both boys.  They had adorned the bill with the cut that Ellis had had
made for Johnson, the tombstone cutter, a weeping angel drooping its
long wings over a stately head-stone.  A rooster and two prancing
stallions at the bottom presaged victory for the vilified Wat.

It was midnight when Ellis slammed the door open.  The two boys were
asleep in the midst of the litter of torn, ink-gaumed and otherwise
spoiled copies of that hideous handbill.  The last pull on the lever of
the press had let it fly back too quickly, and it had flapped its
handle loose and lay wrecked on the floor.  The office had the
appearance of a battleground.  The ink was blood, and the press and
scattered type, casualties.  He stirred the boys with an angry kick.
Jap sat up and peered through the ink over his eyes at his angry
employer.

"We fixed him solid," he declared jubilantly.  "There can't nothing
beat Wat now.  We opened the eyes of the county."

"You surely did," groaned Ellis.  "When the Press Association add to
their Hall of Fame, they will shroud me in the folds of that dad-blamed
bit of art!"




CHAPTER V

Jap came running into the office, early in January, his freckled face
aglow, his red hair standing wildly erect.

"Golly Haggins!" he exploded, "I got a letter from Wat.  He's up at the
Legislator and he writes--he writes this!"  He fairly lunged the letter
at Ellis.

Ellis read, scowling:


"My dear young Friend,--

"I am at the Halls of Justice and I want to fill my promise to reward
you for the noble deed you done.  There is a chance for a bright boy as
page, and I have spoke for it for my noble boy.  Come at once.  Time
and tide won't wait, and there is thirty other boys camped on the trail,

"Respectfully your Friend,
  "WAT HARLOW."


"Whoopee!" yelled Bill, jumping from his stool and turning a handspring
across the office.

"Reckon I'd better ask Flossy to fix my things--get my clothes out?"
asked Jap, beaming radiantly over the big barrel stove.  He started
toward the door.

"Stop!" said Ellis, in a voice Jap had never heard.  "You are not
going."

"Not going?" echoed both boys hollowly.

"No!" almost shouted Ellis, his brown eyes flashing.  "I might have
expected this from that wooden-headed son of a lost art.  Do you think
that you are going to leave my office to lick the boots of that loafing
gang of pie-biters?  Not in a thousand years!  I am going to put a tuck
in that idea right now.  And while I'm talking about it, you may as
well know that Flossy is getting ready to teach you how to 'read and
write and 'rithmetic,' as Bill says.  And as for you, Bill, Flossy says
that if your father hasn't enough pride to do the right thing by you,
she'll give you an education, along with Jap.  You begin your lessons
to-morrow evening.

"Jap, write to that reformed auctioneer and thank him for his favor.
Tell him that you belong to the ancient and honorable order of
printers.  When he runs for governor, you will boom him.  Till then,
nothing doing in the 'Halls of Justice.'"

Jap sulked all day, but he wrote the letter whose contents might have
changed his career, and the following evening he and Bill began the
schooling that Flossy had planned.  It was a full winter for the boys,
the most important of their lives.  Even when spring came, with its
yawns and its drowsy fever, they begged that the lessons continue.
Already the effect was beginning to show in the galley proof.

One morning in July, Jap had held down the office alone.  Flossy was
not well, and Ellis spent as much time with her as possible.  Bill
blustered in, a look of disgust in his brown eyes.

"Ain't nothin' doin' in town, 'cept at Summers's," he exploded,
luxuriating in the kind of speech that was tabooed in the presence of
his elders.  "Only ad I could scare up was at Summers's, and Ellis
don't want that."

Jap looked from the door, beyond the little village park and the hotel,
to where the dingy white face of the saloon stared impudently upon the
town.

"I never see one of them places without scringin'," he said slowly.
"My pappy almost lived in one.  When we were cold, he was warm.  When
Ma and us children were hungry, the saloon fed him, because--because he
could be so amusing and entertaining when he was half drunk.  Ma said
that my pappy's folks were quality, but they didn't have any time for
him.

"I used to creep around to the side winder to see what kind of a drunk
he had.  If it was a mean one, I'd run home and sneak Aggie out and
hide.  He had a spite agin us two, and when he had a mean drunk he used
to beat us.  He was skeered to fetch Fanny Maud.  She had the
wild-cattest temper you ever saw.  He tried to pull her out of bed by
her hair one night, and she jumped on him and scratched his face like a
map.  Ma had to drag her off, and if he hadn't run, Fanny would 'a' got
him again.  After that he would brag what a fine girl she was.  One
night Aggie and me hid in a straw stack all night."

Bill looked sorrowfully upon his friend.

"I thought I was the most forsakenest boy in the world," he said.  "But
my father never beat me, and he never touches no kind of licker.  He
just don't like me around.  You know my mother died when I was born,
and somehow he seems to blame it on me.  I don't know how to figger it,
for he married in a year, and when that one died it didn't take him no
time to start lookin' out again.  He hardly ever speaks to me, 'cept to
cuss me or tell me what a nuisance I am.  Allus makes me feel like a
cabbage worm."

"Cabbage worm?" queried Jap.

"Yes, they turn green when they eat, and I feel like I am green, every
bite I take.  He looks at me so mean, like he thought I hadn't any
right to eat.  That's why I eat at Flossy's, every time she asks me.
The only nice thing my pappy ever done for me was to put me in here
with Ellis.  Jap," he broke off suddenly, "I'm durn glad you licked me,
that day.  But your hair _was_ red!"

Ellis had come quietly in at the rear door and had listened, half
consciously, to the sacred confession.  His face saddened for a moment.
Then he squared his shoulders and his dark eyes flashed.

"I am going to make men of those boys yet," he promised himself.  "Who
knows----"

He interrupted the spasm of painful speculation, the dark foreboding
that had for days hovered over him.  The heat of summer and his anxiety
over Flossy were beginning to tell on his nerves.  He tiptoed softly
out of the back door, across the weed-grown yard and out through the
alley gate.  A moment later he came in at the front door, whistling
blithely.

The summer was intensely hot.  As the dog-days waxed, Ellis grew ever
more and more morose.  His sharp bursts of temper were made tolerable
only by the swift justice of the amend.  Late in September he came down
to the office one morning, pale and shaken.  The boys had been sticking
type for an hour when his sudden entrance startled them.

"Flossy is very sick," he said with lips that quivered, "and I will
have to trust you boys."

Jap followed him to the door.  His face was downcast.

"Is it true, Ellis?  Bill said that Flossy would--would----"  He
gulped.  He could not finish.  Ellis turned suddenly and sat down at
the table and buried his face in the pile of exchanges.  His body shook
with the effort to suppress his emotion.  Bill slipped down from his
stool and the two awkward, ungainly youths looked at each other in
embarrassed sorrow.  Finally Jap laid an inky hand on Ellis's shoulder.

"Tell her--tell her," he stuttered, "that Bill and me are--are
a--prayin'."

Ellis gave a mighty sob and rushed away, bare-headed.

The two apprentices sat at their cases, the tears wetting the type in
their sticks.  The long day dragged by.  Neither of them remembered
noon, but plodded stolidly and silently through the clippings on their
copy hooks.

It was growing dusk when a great commotion arose.  It seemed to come
from the corner near Blanke's drug store.  It gathered force as it
neared Granger's bank, Now it had reached the mouth of the alley that
separated the bank from the _Herald_ office.  There was cheering and
laughter.  Jap's face hardened.  He slung one leg to the floor.  How
dared any one cheer or laugh, when Flossy lay dying?

In another instant Ellis burst into the room.  His dark locks were
rumpled, his eyes wild and bright.

"Get out all the roosters--and the stallions, too!" he shouted.  "Open
a can of vermilion and, in long pica, double-lead it: 'It is a boy!'"

Jap let the other leg fall and dragged himself around.  His mouth had
fallen loose on its hinges.  He sat down on the floor and gaped
foolishly at Ellis.

"She's feeling fine," babbled Ellis, "and you and Bill are coming in
the morning to see the boy."  He rushed out again.

Jap looked at Billy glued to the stool, holding in one paralyzed hand
the inverted stick.

"Gee!" said Jap.

In the morning they tiptoed into Flossy's room.  Very pale and weak was
the energetic little woman who had taken the moulding of their
destinies into her hands.  She smiled gently and, as mothers have done
since time was, she tenderly drew back the covers from a tiny black
head and motioned for the two to look.

"Our boy," she said, smiling radiantly.  "I am going to name him Jasper
William, and I want you to make him very proud of the men he was named
for."

The hot tears sprang to Jap's eyes and fell upon the little red face.
The wee mite, perhaps prompted by an angel whisper from the land from
whence he came, threw aloft one wrinkled hand and touched him on the
cheek.  Sobbing stormily, Jap hid his face in the covers as he knelt
beside the bed.  Then he took the little fingers in his.

"If God lets me live, Flossy, I will make him proud of me."

He choked and dashed outside to join Bill, who was snubbing
[Transcriber's note: "snubbing" is what's in the source book.  Perhaps
the author meant "snuffling" or "sobbing".] audibly on the back steps.
After a muffled silence he said, his eyes growing suddenly bright:

"Bill, did you notice what Flossy said?  She said the 'men' that he was
named after.  Bill, we've got to quit kiddin' and begin to grow up."




CHAPTER VI

Time passed, after the easy-going manner of Bloomtown.  Jap was
sixteen, long, ungainly and stooped from bending over the case.  Bill,
a little older in months, but possessed of immortal youth, was stocky
and rather good looking.  Four years of daily intercourse had wrought a
subtle change in their relations, four years of the stern and the sweet
that Ellis and Flossy Hinton had brought, for the first time, into
their lives.

Bill was at the table, the exchanges pushed back in a disorderly heap,
as he surreptitiously figured a tough problem in bookkeeping that
Flossy had given him.  Jap, with furtive air, bolted the history lesson
that ought to have been learned the day before.  Ellis, his back to the
one big window in the office, scowled over the proofs he was rattling.
From time to time he peppered the air with remarks that fell like bird
shot on the tough oblivion of his two assistants.  At length
forbearance gave way under the strain, and he said, in cold and
measured tones:

"When you are unable to decipher the idea I am trying to convey, I wish
that you would take me into your confidence."

Bill looked up, a grin on his round, shining face, a grin that was
fixed to immobility by the fierceness of Ellis's glance.

"I note that you have injected much native humor into perfectly
legitimate prose," the stern voice continued.  He read:

"'Jim Blanke has a splendid assortment of Sundays.'  Now please
explain.  You are causing the good folks of this town unnecessary
worry.  My copy reads, 'sundries.'"

"Jap done it," vouchsafed Bill.

"Who done this?" Ellis stressed the verbal blunder witheringly, as he
pointed his pencil at the next item.  It read:

"Ross Hawkins soled twenty-five yearling calves."

"It looked that way," argued Jap.

"A devil of a couple you are," declared Ellis wrathfully.  "Can't
either of you reason?  Did you ever hear of any one soling a yearling
calf?  Ross Hawkins is an auctioneer, not a shoemaker."

The boys looked sheepishly at each other.  Suddenly Bill flung himself
on his stomach and howled in glee.

"Lordee!  What if that had 'a' got in the paper!" he gasped.

"There would be two fine, large, lazy boys out of a job," Ellis said
severely.

He threw aside the copy and lifted the type.  Jap followed the movement
with anxious eye.  Another explosion hung, tense and imminent, in the
air.

"Have you washed that type yet, Bill?" he asked, eager to placate Ellis.

It was the custom for the boy nearest the door to disappear when the
time for washing a form was at hand.

"It was your job," protested Bill.  "You promised to wash Wat Harlow's
speech if I cleaned Kelly Joneses stock bill."

Ellis sat down wearily.

"Oh, we're agoing to do it all, this evening," cried Bill, defiantly.
"You promised that we could clean out that box of cuts.  You promised a
long time ago."

"Go to it," said Ellis, his voice relaxing, and the two boys bolted
into the back room.  A little later he joined them.  Jap and Bill sat
on the floor, blowing the dust from a lot of dirty old woodcuts.

"I bought them with the job," he said, turning the pile over with his
foot.  He sat down on the emptied box and watched them as they examined
the cuts.

"What is this?" asked Jap, peering at the largest block in the lot.

"That is a cut of the town, as it was when I came here," said Ellis, a
shadow of reminiscence crossing his face, as he took the block in his
long fingers.

Bill drew himself to his knees and looked at the maze of lines and
depressions curiously.  The picture was as strange to him as it was to
Jap.  Ellis continued:

"There were three business houses here, besides the blacksmith shop and
the saloon.  Here they are.  Ezra Bowers, Bill's grandfather, with the
help of his three sons, ran a general store where they sold everything
from castor oil to mowing machines.  Phineas Blome--an unmistakable son
of old Jerusalem--sold clothing and more castor oil and mowing
machines.  There wasn't such a thing as a butcher shop in Bloomtown.
When the natives wanted fresh meat, they ordered it brought out on the
hack.  In other parts of the world, that institution is sometimes
called a stage; but here I learned that its right name is 'hack.'  The
southern terminus of the Bloomtown, Barton and Faber hack-line, that
has done its best for thirty years to prevent us from being entirely
marooned, was over there at the south side of Blome's Park, exactly as
it is to-day.  The hotel didn't have a bit more paint, the first night
I slept in it, than it has now."

"Flossy said that weathered shingles were fashionable," Bill grinned,
taking up another cut.  "Here's the Public Square--you call it Blome's
Park, but I never heard anybody else call it that," he added, his voice
lifting in a note of query.  "That's the Square, all right, and the
Town Hall, with 'leven horses hitched in front of it."

"Yes, when old man Blome laid out his farm in town lots, he reserved
his woods pasture for a city park.  You never heard of an orthodox town
that didn't begin with a Public Square, and that little rocky glade
with the wet-weather spring had the only trees within ten miles of
here.  It wasn't fit for farming, so Blome argued that nobody would buy
it with a view to raising garden truck.  But your foxy Uncle Blome
didn't sacrifice anything by his generosity to the town that was about
to be born.  He reserved the lots facing the park on three sides, and
held them at an exorbitant figure--as much as five dollars a front
foot, I should say.

"The lots at the north and east were to be sold for high-class
residences only.  Those at the west were reserved for business houses.
Behold the embryo Main street!  Overlooking the park at the south was
Blome's farm house, since metamorphosed into a tavern and barns for the
stage horses.  The last of the Blomes shook the dust of Bloomtown from
his feet when Carter bought his interest in the hack line.  Bill's
grandfather had a farm adjoining Blome's land at the west; but Ezra
Bowers, merchant prince and attorney-at-law," he said whimsically, "had
to have a residence in the fashionable quarter, fronting the park.  A
little patch of the old farm is quite good enough for Mr. and Mrs.
Ellis Hinton and their two sons, Jap and Jasper William."

Jap caught Ellis's hand, a lump arising in his throat.  Bill relieved
the momentary tension by turning over another cut.  A familiar face
looked out at him from the grime of years.  Ellis glanced at it and
smiled.

"It is a great thing, Jap, the birth of a town.  Bloomtown was really
never born.  The stork dropped her when he was traveling for a friendly
haven.  For ten years she lay, just as she fell, without visible signs
of life.  About twenty families existed, somehow.  They had pigs,
chickens and garden truck, and to all intents they would go on existing
till the last trump.

"One day I went out into the country to attend a sale.  Boys, I was
never so well pleased with a day's work as I was with that day's jaunt.
I heard the most masterly bit of eloquence that ever came from the lips
of an auctioneer.  The man had the crowd hypnotized.  He even sold me
an accordion, a thing I was born to hate.  The fact that it was
wind-broken and rattly never occurred to me until I woke up, after he
had done.  Then I went to him and said:

"'You an auctioneer!  You should be in the Halls of Justice, telling
the people how to interpret their laws.'

"The idea struck him.  He came into town with me and we talked the
matter over.  He was easily the best known and most liked man in the
county.  It was then that the political bug stung our good friend, Wat
Harlow.  Wat moved his family to town and soon he had a decent
habitation.  He stimulated a rain of paint and a hail of shingle nails.
He prodded the older inhabitants to an era of wooden pavements and
stone crossings.  Bill's grandfather objected, because he said it cut
down the sale of rubber hip-boots; but Wat's eloquence was the key to
fit anything that tried to lock the wheels of progress.  He did more
than that.  He brought Jim Blanke from Leesburg to start a decent drug
store.

"After that he robbed Barton of Tom Granger, and together they started
the first bank of Bloomtown.  Granger's wife and baby, with Wat's wife,
were the civilization.  Mrs. Granger was almost an invalid, even then,
but she gathered the women together and formed an aid society.  She
begged and cajoled Bowers out of enough money to build a little church
on the lot that Blome had donated.  I joined the church, for the moral
example.  I don't remember what denomination it was supposed to be.  We
had services once a month; but Mrs. Granger was the real power in the
town.  She introduced boiled shirts and neckties.  Tom bought the big
patch of ground, north of the park, and set out those elm trees before
his foundation was in.  Then Jim Blanke got Otto Kraus to come here and
start a private school.  Otto played the little cabinet organ in
church, and taught all the children music, after school hours.  Thus
was Bloomtown born.  Wat Harlow made the blood circulate in her
moribund veins."

Jap looked into Ellis's face, his freckled cheeks glowing.

"That's not what Wat Harlow said," he declared breathlessly.

"What did he say?" asked Ellis sharply.

"Why--why," gulped Jap, "he said that Bloomtown was dead as a herring,
and too no-account to be buried, till Ellis Hinton came and jerked her
out of the mud and started her to breathe."

Ellis got up and dusted his trousers.

"As I said before, Wat was an eloquent auctioneer.  Talk is his trade,
and he keeps in practice.  Dilute his enthusiasm one-half, Jap.  And
now, get to work, washing up."

As he left the office he encountered a group of tittering girls, in
front of the bank.  They scattered when they perceived that Ellis and
not Bill had come forth.  Bill was the lion of the town.  Already the
girls had begun to come after papa's paper, on publishing day, which
upset the machinery of the office, never too dependable.

One Thursday when the air was full of snow, the little office
registered its capacity crowd.  Ellis was at home with a heavy cold,
and Jap and Bill were getting out the paper.  The ink congealed on the
rollers and needed constant warming to lubricate the items reposing on
the bosom of the Washington press.  This warming was Bill's job, and
Jap was exasperated to fighting pitch by the dilatory method of Bill's
peregrinations around the circle of rosy-faced girls, hanging
admiringly on his efforts.

"Chase those girls out," he growled.  "No use for them to hang around.
We won't get this paper out in a week if they stick around after you."

"Old Crabby!" sniffed one of the girls.  "You're just mad because
nobody wants to hang after you."

"Jap is particular," chaffed Bill, half apologetically.  Since they had
assumed the responsibility for the right uplift of Flossy's boy, there
had been growing a new, shy pride in themselves.  "Better wait and come
back in the morning," he suggested.

The girls filed slowly out.  As they passed the table, where Jap was
piling the papers to fold, Isabel Granger, doubtless inspired by the
demon of mischief, leaned forward suddenly and kissed him full on the
mouth.  Then she fled, shrieking with glee.  Jap stood as if stricken
to stone.  Bill looked at him in fright.  There was no color in his
freckled face.  His gray eyes were staring, as if some wonderful vision
had blasted his sight.

"Gee, Jap," said Bill uneasily, "are you sick?"

Jap aroused himself and turned toward the press.

"No," he said slowly, "but I don't like for folks to be familiar like
that.  If I wanted to be a fool like you----"  He stopped and stared a
moment from the window.

"The next time she kisses me," he said shortly, "she will mean it."




CHAPTER VII

What a wonderful thing is a baby!  Babies were not new to either Bill
or Jap.  In Bill's memory lingered the shrill duet of his twin
half-sisters, a continuous performance that had lasted more than a
year.  And Jap had never fully corrected a lurch to the left side, due
to carrying his sister, Agnesia, when he was little more than a baby
himself.  Yet the little visitor from the Land of Yesterday was a never
failing miracle to them.  His cry filled them with fear for his
well-being, and his laugh intoxicated them with its glee.

"Wait till he can talk," smiled Flossy, "Then you will see how wise he
is."

In her heart she was beginning to combat the fear that he would never
talk.  Other children of his age were already chattering like magpies.

"Ma said that I said 'papa' when I was eight months old," declared Jap.
"But I don't know why I should 'a' said that."

Bill grinned fatuously as the baby pulled at his hair.

"Bill won't get his hair cut," said Jap.  "He knows that J. W. would
hang after me, if it wasn't for his curly hair."

The little fellow, who for obvious reasons could be neither Jasper nor
William, had learned to respond with amiable toleration to the soothing
abbreviation, "J. W."  Kicking his stubby legs gleefully, he tangled
his fingers more mercilessly in Bill's brown locks.  Flossy loosed the
fingers gently, as she cooed:

"Naughty, naughty!  Mamma said baby mustn't."

Flinging his fingers aloft in protest, he gurgled: "Ja--Bi!"

Flossy's eyes shone with sudden joy.  It was her son's first attempt at
articulate speech.  The boys lunged forward with one impulse.

"He said 'Jappie,'" Jap cried, his chest swelling with the importance
of it.  Bill glared.

"Why, Jap!"  Pain and indignation were in his tone.  "He tried to say
'Bill.'"

Flossy smiled on them both.  It was a wonderful little kingdom, of
which she had assumed the place of absolute monarch, a monarch so
gentle and so just that her sway was never questioned.

"Ellis puts in half his time trying to teach baby to say the two names
all in one mouthful, so that you boys won't fight about his first
word," she vouchsafed.  "It would have to be either Jap or Bill,
because you never tell him anything but your names."

When they waved their caps in farewell, they were still discussing the
mooted question vehemently.  Was it "Jappie," or a combination of Jap
and Bill?  To both of them the question was vital.  Jap had the better
of the argument, when Bill blurted:

"Anyhow, he's my cousin, and he ain't no relation of yours."  Then he
remembered that significant remark of Ellis's: "A little patch of the
old farm is quite good enough for Mr. and Mrs. Ellis Hinton and their
two sons, Jap and Jasper William," and he was silent the rest of the
way back to the office.

Little J. W. was three years old before he could speak distinctly.  The
child was born with other afflictions than the serious impediment to
his speech, and the four who hung with anguished love on his every
gesture were never free from a certain unnamed anxiety.  He loved Bill,
but he worshipped Jap.  Both were his willing slaves.

One rainy, dismal night in early fall, when Bill's step-mother lay
seriously ill, Flossy left her baby to the care of the small but
usually capable maid who assisted her with the work of the cottage,
while she and Ellis went to the home of Judge Bowers to relieve the
trained nurse who had come up from the city.  At the supper table,
Ellis had remarked that Jap and Bill would be working late that night,
in order to get out a job that had come in when all the resources of
the office were needed for the weekly edition of the _Herald_.  He had
added that he would go over and help them, if his presence could be
spared from the sick-room.

The remark must have lodged in the baby's mind, for he slipped out of
bed, while the maid was employed in the kitchen, and toddled through
the cold rain almost all the way to Main street.  Jim Blanke found him
lying exhausted in the road, a little way from the drug store, the rain
beating pitilessly on his unconscious head and his scantily clad body.

After a night of anxious care, the little fellow relapsed into a state
of coma, and lay for hours, white and still, save for the rasping of
his breath.  The office was closed.  Both boys, frantic with fear,
stood with Ellis as the child lay in his mother's arms, the four
dreading that each hoarse breath would be his last.  Flossy sat erect
in the wide rocking chair, her brave eyes watching every sigh that tore
the little bosom.  Dr. Hall, whose dictum was life and death, was
silent.  And this silence was the last straw for Jap.  He crept nearer.
In fear, he turned from the face of the beloved sufferer.  Ellis caught
the look in the boy's anguished eyes, and a spasm crossed his tightly
compressed lips.  The physician rallied himself from the torpor of
despair that had laid hold on him.

"Try to arouse him," he commanded.  "Try again."  The resources of his
experience and his prescription blank had long since been exhausted.

Flossy bent over her child and called softly:

"Baby, dearest, mamma loves you.  Won't you speak?"

Ellis leaned forward.  His face blanched.  The rasping had ceased!  Jap
caught the look of horror, and dragged himself up to look into the
baby's face.

"He isn't dead!  He's all right!" he shrieked, not knowing that he
spoke.  "He's still breathing.  I can hear him."  His hands grasped the
cold body and lifted it, unconscious of the thing he was doing.

"Oh, J. W.!  Oh, J. W.!" he screamed, "don't go away from us!"

He pressed the child to his breast convulsively, and the miracle
happened.  The solemn black eyes opened and a husky voice said,
"Jappie."

After the excitement was over, and the exhausted mother slept beside
her sleeping child.  Bill said humbly:

"He did say 'Jap' first."

"But he tried to say 'Bill,' too," Jap said loyally.

The next morning, when the office had resumed its normal routine, a
routine that was destined to be only partially interrupted by the death
of Bill's second stepmother, a few days later, Ellis called Jap into
the little back room where, in the dismal days before Flossy's coming,
they had performed all the functions of housekeeping.  He closed the
door, as he laid his hand on Jap's shoulders.

"You saved J. W.'s life," he said solemnly.  "Doc Hall said that you
stopped him, on the threshold, when you gave that dreadful cry."

The baby did not rally, and Ellis worried about this incessantly.  One
day, some weeks after another mound had been added to the group in
Judge Bowers's family lot, and Bill had gone with his father to
appraise the merits of a prospective housekeeper from Birdtown, Ellis
looked up from the proof he was correcting.  Jap noted the anxiety in
his face, and the gray eyes, that could so often render speech
unnecessary, put the question.  Ellis sighed.

"He's not getting along the way he ought to," he mused.  "Doc Hall
prescribed a tonic for him a month ago; but it doesn't seem to take
hold.  He has no constitution to begin with.  His father, exhausted by
privation and ill-health, has handicapped him in the start.

"Jap," he said, as he arose and laid one arm confidingly around the
boy's shoulder, "you must remember that, in the years to come.  I
didn't give the baby a fair chance.  He may need all the help he can
get to carry him through.  If you should live longer than I, you must
be his father and big brother, both."

Jap's gray eyes opened in astonishment.  The idea that there could ever
be a time when Ellis would not be there had never entered his mind.  He
looked into the dark, thin face with its pallor and its unnaturally
bright eyes, and a joyous smile took the place of the momentary shock.

"Doc Hall said that you had grit enough to outlive any disease that
ever lurked in the brush of Bloomtown," he declared eagerly.

"Doc Hall is an optimist," Ellis laughed hollowly.  "I'm not so much
concerned for myself as for the boy and his mother.  You know what J.
W. means to her."

"Bill and I have already talked it over," Jap returned.  "We're going
to be big brothers to J. W.  We're going to take turns at taking him
for long rides on Judge Bowers's old horse, Jeremiah.  Doc Hall said
that long, jolty rides would set him up, rosy and fat, in a little
while.  Bill told me this morning that he had J. W. weighed again, on
Hollins's scales, and he has gained three pounds."

Ellis Hinton's face cleared.  There was a new elasticity in his step as
he crossed the room and laid the copy down on the case.  Unconsciously
he began to whistle, as he clicked the type in the stick.




CHAPTER VIII

Flossy came into the office, leading the boy by the hand, and called
Ellis aside.  Old Jeremiah had done wonders for the little fellow; but
on Flossy Hinton's face there was a look that boded ill to some one.

"I sent for Brother William to meet me here," she said crisply.  "I
want you to back up all that I say."

Before Ellis had breathed twice, she was out looking up the street, and
in less time than you could think it out, she was back, towing the
Judge, who puffed explosively.  Ellis and the three boys had retreated
to the rear office.

"There is not a bit of use to argue, William," she said, her lips in a
hard, straight line.  "Ellis has done more than any one else in town
could do.  When I heard that you had subscribed five thousand dollars
to the new church, I concluded that your charity was a little far
fetched.  Now I want you to subscribe five thousand dollars to the
institution that is making a man of your son.  I want five thousand
dollars for the printing office.  It is too small, and the press is out
of date.  We need all that goes into an up-to-date printing office."

Her brother looked upon her tolerantly.

"Keep it up, Floss.  It never fazed you to ask favors, and you ain't
run down yet."

"It's a shame," she stormed.  "Just look at this little shed!  Why,
even a cross-road blacksmith shop is better."

He looked around appraisingly.

"I reckon it'll house all Ellis's business," he commented.

"Ellis," she flashed, "tell William about the railroad."

Ellis came from the inside office.  He generally withdrew from the
conferences between Flossy and her brother.

"Wat Harlow told me that two of the big railroad systems have entered
into a joint arrangement to shorten their mileage, on through trains to
the West.  He's got it all fixed for the new track to pass through
Bloomtown.  It will give us all the benefit of two railroads."

"You see," said Flossy triumphantly, "the town will boom.  People will
move in, and a first-class newspaper will be the greatest asset."

"I think that the town will take a big start," assured Ellis.  "The
boys will have all they can do with job work, and the office is small
for our present needs."

"Pap, you should watch us carving letters when we get short,"
interposed Bill.  "Last week Jap had to carve three A's for Allen's
handbill.  There are only three of 'em in that case, and Allen wanted
to use six.  His name is Pawhattan Abram Allen, and he wanted the whole
blamed thing spelled out in caps.  I told Jap it was lucky Allen's
folks didn't name him Aaron, on top of all the rest."

"That's good practice for you boys," the Judge snorted.  "I'm mighty
glad you learned something for all the money I spent on you."  He
glanced at his sister witheringly; but Flossy had her eyes fixed on her
husband.

"I wish," Ellis stirred himself to say, "that the town would boom
enough to take all these frame shacks off of Main street, so that the
place wouldn't look like a settlement of campers."

"A good fire would help," commented Bill boldly.

Judge Bowers looked over his glasses at his son.

"Well, when the railroad comes, and the rest of the shacks are moved
out, I will write you a check for five thousand dollars," he snorted,
turning his rotund form out of the door.

Flossy picked up the boy and flounced out, in speechless indignation.
By argument and cajolery she had succeeded in getting six months apiece
for Bill and Jap at the School of Journalism, and at twenty the boys
were far more expert than Ellis was when he began the publication of
the _Herald_.  She had set her heart on the new printing office, and
her eyes were abrim with tears as she stumbled home.

The week wore on until printing day.  It was a day of unimagined
exasperations.  Everything went wrong.  Ellis's usually smooth temper
bent under the stormy comments of the boys, and in the late afternoon
he developed a violent headache and went home.  Things continued to
pile up until it was evident that the boys would have to print the
paper after dark.

It was ten o'clock when they finished.  Jap followed Bill to the
pavement, pausing to lock the door and slip the key in his pocket.  The
town was asleep.  Not a soul was to be seen on Main street.  Bill, who
usually took the short cut across the Public Square to his fathers
house, turned with Jap and walked along Main street to the farther end
of the block.  At Blanke's drug store, he turned into Spring street.
He was saying, in a tone of mixed penitence and anxiety:

"I wish we hadn't riled Ellis so, to-day.  I don't like those headaches
he's having so often, and the way his face gets red every afternoon.
If he ever sneaked out and took a drink--But I know he never does."

"Oh, Ellis is all right, now that little J. W. is getting strong," Jap
insisted.

They had gone some distance in the direction of Flossy's cottage, when
Bill looked across an expanse of vacant lots to where a dim light
burned in the loft of Bolton's barn.

"They're running a poker game," said Bill wisely.

Almost before the words were gone, a wild shriek rent the air.  A flash
of light from the barn loft, a scrambling of feet, and a succession of
dark objects catapulted the ooze of the barnyard, and it was all
ablaze.  A stiff breeze was blowing from the southwest.  Bill ran to
the mill to set the fire whistle, and Jap scrambled through a window of
the Methodist church and began to fling the chimes abroad, so that he
who slept might know that there was a fire in town.  There had been no
rain for weeks, and the frame structures were ripe for burning.

In less than half an hour the row of stores on Main street, in the
block below the _Herald_ office, began to smoke.  From Hollins's
grocery store a brand was carried by the wind and lodged among the dry
shingles of Summers's saloon.  The excitement was augmented, a few
minutes later, by a series of pyrotechnic explosions.  Bucket brigades
were formed, the firemen mostly in undress uniform.

Jap and Bill were in their glory.  Jap was mounted on top of the Town
Hall, directing operations.  Right down the row rushed the flames,
eating up the town.  As if in parting salutation, the fiery monster
leaped across a vacant lot, thick set with dried weeds, and clutched
with heat-red claws at the _Herald_ office.

"This way, men!" yelled Jap.  "You have to get the press and enough
type out to tell about the fire."

Ellis was staring hopelessly at the flame that was licking at the rear
of the office.  The water was exhausted from the town well, and there
was no hope of saving the plant.  But youth is omniscient, and the
townsmen followed the wildly yelling apprentices and hastened to
demolish the office and drag away the debris, some of it already
blazing.  From the salvage rescued from Price's hardware store, and
heaped in a disorderly pile in the Public Square, Jap handed out the
latest thing in fire fighting apparatus.  The flimsy structure, that
had been Ellis Hinton's stronghold for almost twenty years, gave way to
an assault with axes, and the contents, pretty well scattered, were
left standing.  It was nothing that Granger and Harlow's bank went down
with little left to show its location save the fire-proof vault, and
that only a shift in the wind prevented the flames from crossing to the
fashionable residence section east of Main street.

In the morning the _Herald_ force began business in the ruins of its
time-worn shelter, and set up gory accounts of the fire, on brown
manila paper with vermilion and black ink.  A crowd assembled to watch
the exciting spectacle.

"What's the use of a railroad now?" bleated Judge Bowers.  "There ain't
no town to run it through."

"Why ain't there?" asked Jap sharply.

"Why, all the folks are talking of pulling up stakes and moving to
Barton."

"Well, if that is the kind of backbone they have been backing this town
with," snapped the youth, his red hair standing erect, "you help them
move, and the _Herald_ will show them up for quitters--and fill the
town with real men."

And being full of wrath, he proceeded to incorporate this thought in
the half column he was setting up.  The paper was eagerly snapped up by
the crowd.

"Who wrote this?" fairly howled Tom Granger.  "I want to hold his grimy
hand and help him shout for a bigger and better town."

Ellis shoved Jap forward.

"Here is the fire-eater," he announced.  Jap flushed through the dirt
on his face.

"It's true," he said, half shyly.  "There's no good in a quitter.  The
best thing is to smoke them out and get live men to take their places."

"Bravely said," shouted Granger.  "The bank will rebuild with brick.
Who else builds on Main street?"

Before the end of the following week the town was humming with
industry.  Every hack brought its contingent of insurance adjusters,
and merchants elbowed contractors in the little telegraph office, in
endeavors to get supplies.  On Thursday a curious crowd stood watching
Ellis and the boys run the blistered but still faithful Washington
press in the boiling sun.

"Goin' to get winter after a while, Jap," shouted one of the
bystanders.  "You'll have to wear ear muffs to get out your paper."

Jap grinned and swung the lever around methodically.

"What are you going to do, Ellis?" asked the honorable member from the
"Halls of Justice," who had hurried to his little home town in her hour
of trouble.  "There ain't a vacant shack in town.  It seems a darned
shame that you'll have to give up, after starving with the town till it
gets its toes set in gravel at last.  Now that the railroad is running
this way like a scared wolf, the town needs a paper worse than ever."

"Who said they was going to quit?" demanded Judge Bowers pugnaciously.
"They ain't!  Ellis is goin' to have a two-story brick, with a printin'
press that runs itself.  This here town ain't no quitter."  He glared
fiercely at Harlow.

Jap lingered with Ellis until the last of the day's work was finished.
As he started for home he came upon an animated group, in the shade of
the half-burned drug store.  Behind a pile of wreckage, Bill was
holding court.  Jap stopped short.  Bill was telling a lurid tale of
superhuman strength and dare-devil bravery, of which Jap Herron was the
hero, a tale that grew with every telling.  A wave of embarrassment
swept over Jap.  As he turned hastily away, he felt a soft clutch on
his arm.  He looked back.  Two sparkling black eyes were looking up
into his.

"I think that you are the bravest boy in the world," whispered Isabel
Granger, "and--and I am glad I kissed you that time."

Jap stared at her, stunned by a new emotion.  In another moment she was
gone, flying across the street in the direction of her home.

"Anybody but Jap would 'a took her up on that," insinuated Bill, who
had heard Isabel's last words.

Jap turned a murderous look upon him.  The crowd of girls tittered as
they dispersed.  When supper was over Jap returned to the spot, and
long after dark he sat upon the pile of wreckage, thinking long, long
thoughts.




CHAPTER IX

The scraping of saw, the clang of hammer and the smell of fresh paint
classed Bloomtown as "Boomtown."  The railroad had already peered into
the northern environs of the town, cutting diagonally across Main
street, some half-dozen blocks from the plot of ground that had been
rechristened Court House Square.  A substantial municipal building took
the place of the dingy old Town Hall, and the barns of the now almost
defunct Bloomtown, Barton and Faber hack line had been cleared away to
make room for a decent hotel.  In the angle between the railroad tracks
and Main street a small temporary station sheltered travelers.  The
half-moribund village had burst its swaddling bands and begun to
expand.  Everybody was wearing grins as a radiant garment.

As the summer traveled toward July, the headaches that had been so
frequent the past winter merged into a feeling of utter exhaustion, and
Ellis came down to the office but few days of each week.  Flossy
stopped Jap at the gate one noon hour.

"Ellis has something to tell you, Jappie, and I want you to be very
composed.  Don't let yourself go."  Her voice was full of pleading.
She turned quickly as Ellis appeared in the doorway.  He walked out to
meet them.

"Let us sit out under the trellis while Flossy finishes fixing dinner,"
he said, leading the way.  "Jap, your birthday comes to-morrow, and I
am going to ask you to accept a sacred trust that is a burden.  You are
twenty-one and, as they say, 'your own man.'  I want to ask you to be
_my man_.  Jap, I am going away, how far God only knows.  The doctor
says that my lungs are all wrong, and life in the mountains may save
me.  My boy--for you have been my boy since you walked through my door,
nine years ago--I want you to take charge of the office, and shoulder
the support of Flossy and the little one if--if----"  He caught the
horror-stricken boy's hand.  "Jap, I will never come back.  I know it.
I have talked with my soul and it is well.  Will you do it, Jap?"

Jap pressed Ellis's feverish hand between his strong young palms.  He
could not speak.  His eyes were dry and his lips twitched.

"There," cautioned Ellis, "no heavy face before Flossy.  God bless her!
she thinks that I will be well before the new office is done, and is
making more splendid plans for the big opening!  She is----  Jap, you
dunce, grin about something!"

Flossy and the boy came dancing down the sun-flecked path and Jap swung
the slender little fellow to his shoulder and began a mock race from
Ellis.

As soon as dinner was over, a dinner that stuck in his throat for
hours, he told Flossy that two men were rushing Bill to desperation for
their handbills.  He hurried out by way of the alley.  Flossy ran after
him.  "You forgot your hat, Jap," she cried breathlessly.  He took the
hat and started off silently.

"Wait a minute, Jap."  Her voice was insistent.  "You didn't put on a
grave face with Ellis, did you?  Oh, Jap"--the cry was from her
heart--"he will never live to see the new office!  He will never know
of the realization of his dreams, the big town, the trains whirling
through, and he looking down from his lofty window with a smile of
superior joy.  Oh, Jap, how often have we heard him tell about it!  He
doesn't know.  He is full of hope.  Only just before you came he was
joking about the Star Spangled Banner he was going to wind around his
brow when he dedicated the _Herald_ office.  Jap, be true to his faith,
for he will never open the door of that office.  He will never help to
get out the first paper."

She strangled and turned away.  Then in brisk tones she added:

"Now, Jap, hurry along.  Here comes Ellis to scold."  And in the
marvelous manner that is God-given to loving women, she forced a smile
to her lips as she gave the youth a playful shove and ran to meet her
husband.

A few days later they left.  The town took a holiday, and with laughter
and merrymaking it celebrated Ellis Hinton's first vacation.  A water
tank was in process of construction, at the upper end of a half-mile
stretch of double track, and at the lower end of the siding, close to
Main street, the imposing brick railroad station stood in potential
grandeur, its bricks still separated by straw and its ample foundation
giving promise of stability as it reposed in sacks of cement and piles
of crushed stone.  Something of this was incorporated in Ellis's
farewell speech as he addressed his townspeople.  When the train began
to move his black head was still visible, as he returned quip for joke.
And Flossy was flitting from her lifelong friends as if no trouble
clouded her brow.

Little J. W. was the feature of the going, and under the pretense of
caring for his wants, their sleeper compartment had been piled with
fruit and flowers by loving friends who had gone on to the nearest town
to meet the train, so that the surprise should be the more complete.
Then, to the sound of the village band, Ellis left what he had always
called "my town."  Jap did not go to the station, and when Bill found
the door of their improvised office locked, he turned silently away.
His heart was full, too.

The Widow Raymond had offered them a room for a printing office.  The
press occupied the room.  Jap and Bill set the type in the woodshed and
carried the galleys in.  During the nine years of their association
Bill had been the unsteady member of the team, consuming more effort in
devising ways and means of escaping work than the work would have cost,
and toiling with feverish penitence when he realized that he had
wrought a hardship to Jap or Ellis.  But now, inspired by the dimpled
face of Rosy Raymond, he worked as he had never worked in his life.
Odd things began to happen.  Bill insisted on doing all the
proof-reading, a task he had hitherto detested.  A bit of verse
occasionally crept into the columns of the _Herald_.  Jap did not
detect this verse for several weeks.  When he did, he descended upon
Bill.

"Where in Heck did you filch that doggerel?"

"Who said it was doggerel?" demanded Bill.

"Lord love you," cried Jap, "what could any sane being call it?  What
did you get for publishing it--advertising rates?"

"You're a fool!" snapped Bill.  "You think that you're a criterion.  I
will have you know that lots of folks have complimented it."

Jap took up the offending sheet.

"'Thine eyes are blue, thine lips are red, thine locks are gold,'" he
groaned.  He looked at Bill.  Just then the door opened and Rosy
stepped into the room.  A great light shone on Jap's understanding.
Her eyes were blue, her lips certainly red, and a fervid imagination
could call her hair gold.  He sighed pathetically.

"Bill, don't you think you could write it out and relieve the pressure
on your heart, without endangering our prestige?"

Bill kicked at the mongrel dog that had its habitat under the press,
and marched out indignantly.

"I'll be glad if I get him out of here single," mused Jap.  "He has
these spells as regular as the seasons change.  Heretofore his
prospects have never entitled him to consideration.  This time it may
be different."

Bill had been systematically chased from every front gate in town,
behind which rosy-cheeked girls abode; but the disquieting conviction
swooped down upon Jap that Barkis, in the shape of the Widow Raymond,
might be more than "willin'" to hitch Bill to her sixteen-year-old
daughter.  And if Bill had not contracted a new variety of measles at
the most opportune time, Jap's forebodings might have been realized.
Bill had the "catching" habit.  No contagion in town ever escaped him,
and this time he was so ill that he had to go to the country to
recuperate.

The new stores opened, one by one, with much celebration.  Owing to
several unaccountable financial complications, the last of all the
important buildings on Main street to be finished was the _Herald_
office.  A cylinder press, second-handed, to be sure, but none the less
an object of admiration, was installed, and fonts of clean, new type
stood ready for work.  There was a great, sunny front office on the
main floor, and the ample space behind it had been divided into
composing room, press room and private office.  On the second floor was
a small job press, and here, at Jap's suggestion, the old Washington
press was stored.  The rooms were decorated with flags, and bunting was
strung across the front of the office.  Judge Bowers had personally
attended to this.

"You're going to have a dandy paper," Tom Granger beamed, as he
accompanied Jap on the final tour of inspection.  "We'll all have to
stop business to watch this cylinder press spill out the news."

Wat Harlow had run down from the Capital to congratulate the staff.  At
his suggestion the merchants had ordered flowers from the city, and
great vases of roses and carnations, and decorative pieces in symbolic
design, stood around in fragrant profusion.  Every room of the office
was filled with them.

The forms were ready for the printing of that first paper, and only
awaited the conclusion of Wat's speech, to be placed upon the press, so
that Bloomtown should receive the salutatory _Herald_.  Jap turned to
the assemblage, waiting in eager curiosity to see the cylinder revolve.

"The paper will be printed on Ellis's press," he said briefly.  "I
don't want to be ungrateful for your kindness, but will you leave Bill
and me alone to get out our first edition?"

They filed out slowly, awed by the grief in the voice of Ellis's boy.

With the old types, on the old Washington hand press, they printed the
first _Herald_ of the new regime.  With the exception of the greeting
on the front page, every word was reprinted from the predictions
written by Ellis in the years agone, and the greeting, in long pica on
the first page, was his telegram to them and his townsmen received that
morning.

When the last paper was printed by the two sad-faced boys on their day
of jubilee, and the pile had been folded and carried downstairs, Jap
closed the press upon the inky type, and gathered the great bunches of
fragrant blossoms and heaped them upon the press, to be forever silent.
With a groan of anguish, he threw himself against them.  Bill slipped
his arm through Jap's, and together they celebrated the day that was
Ellis's.  And in the night the telegram came:

"At rest.  FLOSSY."




CHAPTER X

When Ellis went away it was to the sound of jollity.  He came back to a
town shrouded in mourning.  Every store was closed, and symbols of
grief adorned most of them.  Wat Harlow, with a delicacy Ellis would
scarcely have expected of him, had ordered purple ribbon and white
flowers to tie with the crape.  Silent and grief-stricken, the town
stood waiting the arrival of the train.  When it came, the coffin was
lifted by loving hands and carried the ten long blocks to the church.
No cold hearse rattled his precious body, but, even as the body of
Robert Louis Stevenson was held by human touch until the last office
was done, so was Ellis Hinton, the country printer, carried to his last
repose by the hands of his friends.

Not until Jap looked for a long, anguished moment upon the
flower-massed grave did he realize that he was alone, that he was
drifting, that he had no anchor.  Something of this he expressed to
Flossy, between dry sobs, when they had left Ellis alone in the
secluded little cemetery.  Her eyes burned with a strange, maternal
light as she comforted the boy whose grief was of the fibre of her own.

"Ellis knew that you would feel that way," she said gently, "and
because of that, he made a will that is to be read to-night.  Wat
Harlow has it.  Until it is read, I want you not to trouble."

That evening, with all the important men of the town assembled in the
big front room of the _Herald_ office, Wat Harlow read brokenly the
last "reading notice" of Bloomtown's sleeping hero.  It was written in
the familiar scrawl that everybody knew, with scarcely a waver in its
lines to tell that a dying hand had penned it:


"I am going a long journey, but not so far that I cannot vision your
growth.  It was the labor of love to plan for this time.  In the
gracious wisdom of God it was not intended that I should enjoy it with
you; but as Moses looked into his promised land, so through the eyes of
the _Herald_ I have seen mine.  And God, in His wonderful way, has sent
you another optimist to do the royal work of upbuilding a town.

"My town, my people, I leave to you the greatest gift I have to offer.
I give you my boy, Jap.  He is worthy.  Hold up his hands, in memory of

"ELLIS HINTON."


As Harlow folded the paper, with hands that trembled, he was not
conscious of the fact that hot tears were streaming down his cheeks.
There was an instant of tense silence.  Then Tom Granger walked over to
the boy who lay, face downward across the table, arms outspread in
abandon of grief.  He took one limp hand in his, and a voiceless
message went from heart to heart.  Jap aroused himself.  One by one the
men of Bloomtown filed by.  No word was spoken, but each man pledged
himself to Ellis Hinton as he took the hand of Ellis's boy in a firm
clasp.  When the others had gone, Wat Harlow remained.

For a moment he stood silent beside the table.  Then with a cry of
utter heartbreak, he sank to his knees and permitted the bereaved boy
to give vent to his long-repressed agony in a saving flood of tears.
When they left the office together, there had been welded a friendship
that was stronger than years of any other understanding could have
given.

Flossy went back to the cottage, and, like the brave helpmeet of such a
man as Ellis Hinton must have been, did not sadden the days with her
grief.  Sometimes, in the little arbor, with J. W. playing at her feet,
she sang softly over her sewing:

  "Beautiful isle of Somewhere,
    Isle of the true, where we live anew,
  Beautiful isle of Somewhere."


It was her advice that caused the boys to fit up a bedroom and
living-room on the second floor of the office.  It was her idea that
separated Bill from the unsteady air of his home.  The Judge, heeding
the scriptural injunction implied in the immortal words of Moses, "It
is not good that man should be alone," had taken unto himself a fourth
wife, and Bill had so many rows with his latest stepmother that there
was no opposition to the change.  Tom Granger observed that it had been
so many matrimonial moons since Bill had a mother that he did not know
whether he had any real kinfolks at all.  It was certain that he knew
little of the real meaning of the word "home."  Flossy boarded them,
and her cottage was their haven of refuge during many a long evening.
It was sad comfort, and yet it was the surest comfort, to have her live
over again those last days in the mountains, when Ellis's thoughts
bridged space and visualized the rebuilding of Bloomtown.

Perhaps Flossy sensed the fact that these evenings were bone and sinew
to Jap's manhood.  The boy, never careless, was changing to a man of
purpose, such as would be the product of Ellis Hinton's training.  The
stray, born of the union of purposeless, useless Jacky Herron, and
Mary, peevish and fretful, changeable and inconstant, had been born
again into the likeness of the man who bad been almost a demigod to him.

The town was growing, as Ellis had prophesied, and was creeping in
three directions across the prairie.  It incorporated and began to
settle into regular lines.  Spring street showed but few gaps in the
line of cottages that ran almost all the way from the rear of Blanke's
drug store to Flossy's home, and another line of modest cottages looked
at them from the other side of the street.  A new and fashionable
residence place was laid out, in the extreme south end of town, as far
from the grime and soot of the railroad as possible; but the
substantial old families still clung to their ancestral halls in the
vicinity of Court House Square.

One day in early spring Bill burst into the office, his reporter's pad
flapping wildly.  His brown eyes danced.

"Big doings!" he shouted.  "Pap's going to run for mayor, and he wants
the _Herald_ to voice the cry of the town for his services."

"Who said so?" queried Jap, sticking away at the last legislative
report.

"Nobody but him--as far as I can find out," Bill returned, grinning
knowingly.  "It seems that they had a mess of turnip greens, from
cellar sprouts, and they gave him cramps.  He was dozing under
paregoric when the idea hit him.  It grew like the turnip sprouts, fast
but pale.  He wants us to water the sprouts and give 'em air, so that
they'll get color in them."

"How much did he send in for the color?" asked Jap, climbing down
interestedly.

The Associate Editor flashed a two-dollar bill.

"I told Pap that if any opposition sprouted, he'd have to raise the
ante," he remarked.  "He squealed loud enough when I squeezed him for
this, but I convinced him that we had about done away with charity
practice.  Told him the _Herald_ was out of the amateur class, and
after this election the ante 'd be five bones."

"Well," conceded Jap, "as he is Flossy's brother, we'll have to spread
it on thick for the low price of introduction.  Look up that woodcut of
Sames, the Chautauqua lecturer.  If you'll chisel off the beard, we can
use it for the Judge.  I think that we will kill that story you cribbed
from the St. Louis _Republic_, about the President's morning canter
with his family physician, and run the Judge along the first column.
By the way, Bill, it would be a good idea to trace his career from
joyous boyhood to the dignity of the judicial office.  What judge was
he?  Since I have known him, he has never 'worked at the bench.'"

Bill grinned wickedly.

"He was judge of live stock at the county fair!"

"Fallen is Caesar!" Jap exploded.  "What can we say about him?"

"Nothin' for certain, as Kelly Jones says," Bill lamented.

"I never tried fiction," Jap averred, "but for the honor of the first
aspirant to the office of Mayor of Bloomtown, and the greater glory of
our Associate Editor, I am going to plunge."

And plunge he did.  When the town read the eulogium that Jap spread
upon the front page of the _Herald_ it gasped as from a sudden cold
plunge, sat up, rubbed its eyes, and concluded that it had somehow
failed to understand or appreciate its foremost son.  Hollins, the
leading grocer, and Bolton, the furniture dealer, had felt the itch for
office; and Marquis, the attorney, had stood in his doorway for a week
awaiting the delegation that would press upon him the nomination; but
all these aspirants faded like poppies in the wake of the reaper.
Nobody could be found to buck a sure thing, such as Judge Bowers,
backed by the power of the press.

The week after election, the _Herald_ sported fifty small flags through
its columns, and quoted Wat Harlow's speech in which he declared that
Judge William Hiram Bowers was "the noblest Roman of them all."  For
which Bill accounted to Jap by the astute observation that Rome was a
long way off.  The Judge hardly caught Wat's meaning, and came into the
office to protest.

"I am afeard that folks 'll think we have Catholic blood in the
family," he complained, shaking the paper nervously.

"Mystery is the blood of progress, Pap," assured Bill gravely.  "If you
will notice, the men that get there always have a skeleton rattling a
limb now and then."

"Mis' Bowers don't like it," he objected.  "I had to quit the
Methodists and be immersed in the Baptists afore she'd have me, and now
she's fairly tearin' up the wind over this talk about me bein' a Roman.
You gotta correct it!"

"We have given you a hundred dollars' worth of advertising for a measly
two-dollar bill," declared Jap emphatically.  "The columns of the
_Herald_ are free to news.  Advertising at our regular rates.  Bill
will give you particulars."

"Dollar an inch for display," crisped Bill; "ten cents a line for
readers."  He seated himself, pencil in band, as he added, "payable in
advance."

"Make a flat rate of ten dollars, as it is the Judge," advised Jap
judicially.

The Mayor-elect decided to let it alone; but Jap mentioned the fact, in
the next issue of the _Herald_, that Judge Bowers had alleged that he
was born in New England, of Puritan stock, and had no Italian
sympathies--which lucid statement abundantly satisfied Judge and Mrs.
Bowers, but set the town to wondering what the Judge was hiding in the
dim annals of his past.




CHAPTER XI

"I worked a bunch of passes out of the agent for that Indian medicine
show," announced Bill, washing his hands.  "Want to take her, Jap?" and
he jerked his head in the direction of the front door, where Isabel
Granger was passing.

"No; I'm going out to Flossy's a while.  I want to talk some things
over with her."

There was no further discussion, for at that moment Rosy Raymond
floated by, and Bill started out in eager pursuit.  Ever since the
election, Jap had been obsessed by a disquieting foreboding.  One of
Mayor Bowers's first official acts was to authorize the opening of a
second saloon on Main street, and he was rapidly pushing the work of
erecting two new business houses which, rumor declared, were to house
other thirst palaces.  Hitherto the natives and the surrounding
territory had been amply supplied by Holmes; but Bloomtown was growing
beyond the reach of one saloon.

Holmes had come across with a double-sized license, under promise of
the Mayor that he should continue to have a monopoly of the trade.  And
when the good people of the various churches waited upon Judge Bowers
to protest against what they were disposed to call the "introduction of
Satan into their town," he called their attention to the need for
municipal revenue.  If one saloon was a help, two saloons would double
that help.  The town had already begun to show signs of genuine
progress.  It had to build a calaboose to take care of the saloon's
patrons, and the regular fines for plain drunks almost paid the cost of
the court that collected them.

Once Jap thought he detected a sinister reason for Bill's flushed
cheeks and unsteady gait as he passed hastily through the office on his
way to the sleeping room above.  The next morning Bill declared that he
had been a fool, and had paid for his folly with a severe headache, and
Jap, with the delicacy that was Jap's, let the subject drop.  It was
becoming fashionable for the young fellows of the town to assume a
tough swagger.  Those who had formerly resorted to barn lofts and musty
cellars paraded their sophistication on Main street, and Bill would
rather be dead than out of style.  Jap wanted to talk it over with
Flossy, but he had never found the key to open such poignant
confidence.  What right had he to burden Flossy with fresh anxiety?  In
his loneliness, he yearned for Ellis as he had never yearned before.

He was sitting on the little front porch, tossing J. W. on the tough
old trotting horse afforded by his two ill-padded knees, and vaguely
wondering how he could introduce the subject of Bloomtown's swift
decay, without wounding Judge Bowers's sister and Bill's aunt, when
they heard a great tumult in the vicinity of the medicine show.  After
a while Bill came up the walk with Rosy.

"What was the racket about?" Jap asked incuriously.

Rosy giggled.

"They wanted to nominate the ugliest man in town, and there was a
fight," she said.

"Shut up!" growled Bill.  "Haven't you got any sense?"

"Sam Waldron nominated Jap," she sputtered, between giggles.

A hot flush swept over Jap.  Always keenly sensitive, he had never
armored himself against the playful brutalities of his friends.  The
shame of being made a subject of ridicule cut deeply.

"Rosy is a fool!" snapped Bill.

"What was the fuss about?" asked Flossy, prompted by a conviction that
further revelation would be good for Jap.

"Why, Isabel Granger slapped his face, and Bill jumped in and punched
him in the ribs, and the crowd wanted to take him down to the pond and
duck him."

Flossy's hand sought Jap's, and she laughed softly.

"That was worth while, boy.  How Ellis would have written it up!"

Jap smiled, but the sting was still there.  When it was evident that
Bill and Rosy expected to spend the evening, he arose with a tired,
"Well, I'll be going," and walked around the cottage to the alley gate.
He was afraid of meeting some one on Spring street, and he made excuse
to his own consciousness that the alley had always been the rational
highway between the cottage and the office.  He put his hand in his
pocket for his key, as he emerged on Main street.

As he approached the door, he saw that some one was sitting on the
steps.  She sprang up and laid trembling hands on his arm.

"Oh, Jap, you won't mind!  You won't let it hurt you?  Everybody knows
that you are the best-looking man in town.  At least I--think so!"

Before he could grasp her arm, the girl was gone.  That night Jap lay
awake long hours, thinking, thinking.  With the morning, reason
returned.  He had assumed responsibility for Flossy and the boy.  He
must not think again.

And indeed the next few days gave him little time for thought.  Wat
Harlow slipped into the office late one afternoon.  He wore a furtive
look and an appearance of guilt.  There was about him a suggestion of
gum shoes.  Something must be amiss.

"I want to see you alone, Jap," he confessed.

Jap led the way to the little private office.  Harlow was pulling
nervously at the stubby mustache that hid his short upper lip.

"In trouble, Wat?" asked Jap anxiously.

"No--not exactly.  You see, it's this way----"  He coughed
apologetically.  "The wife had a dream, a funny dream, the other night.
She's had curious dreams ever since we took that long trip, to New York
and all over, last year, and there may be nothing to it, but----"  He
lit a fresh cigar, and went at it again.  "She says that she saw me
going into the Capitol at Washington just as if I belonged there.  And
she got a notion----  Jap, you know how notionate women are.  She
thinks--well, she thinks that I might be called to run for the House of
Representatives."

"Oh, I see," said Jap, illuminated.  "It would sound good for the
_Herald_ to mention that you are in line?"

"Not rough-like, Jap!  Just a little tickle in the ribs, to see what
they'd say."

"Oh, I'll fix that," declared Jap, laughing.  And the _Herald_ flung
the hat in the ring for "Harlow, the one honest man."

Jap smiled sadly as he read his copy over.  He had a habit of wondering
what Ellis would have said.  He wondered, too, what attitude the editor
of the Barton _Standard_ would take.  The _Standard_ had recently
changed hands, and since Bloomtown had pulled a saloon, a sunbonnet
factory and two business houses out of Barton, a rapid-fire editorial
war had been in progress.  By some curious dispensation of Providence,
Jones of the _Standard_ and Herron of the _Herald_ had never met.  Jap
was not hunting trouble, but the same spirit that prompted him to
thrash his tormentors, the day of his advent in Ellis Hinton's town,
caused him to wield a fire-tipped pen against the _Standard_.

That opposition to Wat's candidacy would develop, before the
nomination, was to be expected; but opposition on the part of the
Barton _Standard_ would be a purely personal matter, the _Standard_
having its own party fights to foster.  But that was all Jap feared.

It was even worse than he could have imagined, for Jones dug up a
bloody ghost to walk at every political meeting.  Not only were all Wat
Harlow's sins of omission and commission paraded in the _Standard_, but
he was proclaimed as the implacable foe of higher education.  In vain
did his home paper print his record, of beneficent bills introduced, of
committee work on behalf of the district schools, and his great speech
setting forth the need of a new normal school building.  Jones had one
trump card left in his hand, and the day before the convention he
played it.  It was a handbill, yellow with age and ragged around the
edges, but still showing a badly spelled, abominably punctuated story
in vermilion ink, with a weeping angel at the top and a rooster and two
prancing stallions at the bottom.  It proved Wat Harlow the undying foe
of the State University.

Despite all the _Herald's_ valiant work, that nightmare was Harlow's
undoing.  The nomination went to a rising politician at the opposite
side of the congressional district.  A great change had come over the
sentiment, of the state, since the day when the University had been the
favorite tool of the political grafters.  Every village had its band of
rooters for the Alma Mater, and when the nominating convention came to
a close it was apparent that Wat Harlow was hardly an "also ran."

Defeat was galling enough; but the _Standard's_ expressions of glee
were unbearable.  Jap's red hair stood on end, "like quills upon the
fretful porcupine," as he stood at his case and threw the type into the
stick, hot from the wrath in his soul.  The paper was printed, as
usual, on Thursday; but Friday brought a change in the even tenor of
Bloomtown's way.  Jones, of the _Standard_, was a passenger on the
eastbound train that left Barton a little after noon.  His destination
was Bloomtown.

"I am looking for a cross-eyed, slit-eared pup by the name of Herron,"
was the greeting he flung into the _Herald's_ sanctum.  The door to the
composing room was open.  Jap looked up wearily.

"Would you mind sitting down and keeping quiet till I finish setting up
this address to the bag of wind that edits the Barton _Standard_?" he
said impersonally.

Jones, of the _Standard_, sat down and gaped at the long, lank figure
on the stool.  A moment he went limp and terrified; then he rallied his
courage.

"Do you unwind all at once?" he asked, as Jap disentangled his legs
from the stool.  "I take back what I said about a pup.  You're a
full-grown dog, all right.  I wasn't looking for a brick-top, either.
No wonder you have a weakness for vermilion."

"Better come outside of town," Jap interrupted.  "I've been intending
to go over to Barton to have a look at you, but it's better thus.  I
have been stealing space from my readers long enough.  They pay for
more important things than my private opinion of you.  I made up my
mind to stop the argument by giving you a hell of a licking, and I've
only waited because I didn't care to risk my reputation in a
neighboring town.  Here it will be different.  In the midst of my
friends, I hope to fix you so that you'll never try to throw filth on
any one again."

Jones arose hastily.

"I want no row," he said uneasily.  "I just want an understanding."

"You have the right idea," cried Jap.  "You are going to get lots of
understanding before you leave Bloomtown."

At that moment the town marshal strolled in, wearing his star pinned on
his blue flannel shirt.

"I demand protection," Jones shouted.  "This man has threatened me."

"What's the row, Jap?" asked the monitor of peace tolerantly.

"This is Mr. Wilfred Jones, of the Barton _Standard_," was all that Jap
said.  But the effect was electrical.  The man of peace was transformed
into an engine of vengeance.

"Going to beat him up?" he yelled.  "Go to it, and I'm here, if you
need help."

Jap took off his coat, deliberately.  He unclasped his cuffs and was in
the act of unbuttoning his collar, when the local freight whistled for
the crossing below town.  With a mighty leap the man from Barton
cleared the space between his chair and the door.  The strolling
populace of Main street was scattered like leaves before a sudden gust
of wind.  There was an abortive cry of "Stop, thief!" and a bewildered
pursuit by several tipsy bums who had been loafing in front of
Bingham's saloon, but the appearance of the marshal, wearing a broad
grin of satisfaction, dispelled apprehension.

"That was Jones, travelin' light," he explained.

The next issue of the _Standard_ failed to mention the editorial visit
to Bloomtown; but the scurrilous articles ceased and there was quiet
again.

"Did Ellis ever have a fight--that kind of a fight--with anybody?" Jap
asked Flossy, when Bill had finished his second-hand recital of the
show that "he wouldn't have missed for his farm in Texas."  In Bill's
heart there arose a mighty resentment against Rosy Raymond, who had
enticed him from the office just before Jones arrived.

"Ellis did a good deal of fighting before he got me to fight his
battles for him," she said, a whimsical smile in her gentle eyes.  "You
ought to know, Jap.  I never would have had Ellis if he hadn't whipped
Brother William."

"But that wasn't a matter of personal grudge," Jap argued.  It had
seemed to him that somehow he had degraded himself when he went down to
Jones's ethical level.  "I wanted to use my fists because Jones
ridiculed me.  When Ellis licked the Judge, it wasn't a personal
matter.  He did it for me."

"And you did this for--for the honor of Bloomtown," cried Bill, with
enthusiasm.




CHAPTER XII

"Something's broke loose," announced Bill, slamming the door violently.
"Pap's bought an automobile."  Which illuminative remark indicated that
Judge Bowers's mind had expanded to let in a fresh vagary.

Jap looked up inquiringly.

"I reckon it's all on account of Billy Wamkiss," Bill explained.

"Billy who?  There never was no such animal," and Jap scowled at the
stick in his hand.  Conditions in Bloomtown were, as Jim Blanke
expressed it, all to the bad.  While the political fight was at white
heat the Mayor had contrived to have his own way.  He was going to
"make the town" which Ellis Hinton had failed to make.  There would be
revenue enough to provide metropolitan improvements, and already there
was a metropolitan, perhaps even a Monte Carlo-tan, air to the recently
awakened village, as every train disgorged its Saturday evening crowd
of gamblers from the city where the lid had gone on with ruthless
completeness.

Mrs. Granger had arisen from a sick-bed to call together the women of
all the churches to make protest at the licensing of another pool-room,
with bar and poker attachment, not two blocks from her home, a stroke
that had met its counter stroke when the saloon element threatened to
boycott Granger's bank and open a rival financial institution in one of
the store-rooms of the recently erected hotel that faced the Court
House Square, half a block away.  Another crowd, the men with
store-rooms and cottages to rent, promised to carry all their banking
business to Barton, if Granger didn't "sit on his wife good and proper."

"Never was no such animal?" Bill repeated.  "Wake up, Jap.  Don't you
know who Billy Wamkiss is?"

"Never heard of the guy," Jap insisted.

"He's that greasy, wall-eyed temperance lecturer that's been stringing
the town for a week."

"Humph!" Jap snorted.  "Time for you to wake up, Bill.  You brought in
the ad yourself, and you wrote the account of the first lecture.  The
columns of the _Herald_ will bear me out that the reverend gentleman's
name is Silas Parsons."

"Yes, that's his reverend name," Bill snorted.  "When he's the advance
agent of a rotgut whiskey house over in Kentucky that supplies fancy
packages to all the dry territory around here, he's plain Billy
Wamkiss."

"Oh, that's his game!"  Jap sat up, his gray eyes wide with
astonishment.  "How did you get next to it?"

"Your good friend, Wilfred Jones, put me wise.  He didn't mean to, but
he let it slip out when he wasn't watching.  I ran into him over in
Barton this morning and he was roasting Bloomtown as usual.  Said we
were a bunch of Rubes, to fall for a raw proposition like Billy
Wamkiss, dressed up as a temperance lecturer.  And then he went on to
say that my daddy would get richer'n he already is, from his rake-off
on the moisture that'll be injected into the town after she goes dry.
He said he met Wamkiss in Chicago three years ago, and he's been doing
a rattling business all over the country--deliver lectures on the evils
of the Demon Rum that'd bring tears to the eyes of a potato; dry up the
territory, with the help of the churches; and then fill up the town
with drug stores.  That's his program, and it's going to work here,
thanks to my amiable and honorable father."

Jap was silent.  He had no words with which to express his emotions.
Bill went out on the street, his reporter's pad under his arm.  In half
an hour he returned.

"It's worse--I mean more incriminating--than I thought, Jap," he said,
as he drew his partner into the private office and shut the door.

"Did you attend that meeting at the Baptist Church?" Jap asked
anxiously.

"Yes, and I had to dig out before it was over.  I wanted to explode,
and blow up the whole bunch of idiots and crooks.  Pap and Wamkiss,
alias Parsons, have formed some kind of a Templar lodge, and my daddy's
got himself elected secretary.  They're going to dry up Bloomtown.
Fancy it!  They did a lot of crooked work over at the Court House, so
as to make it look as if all the licenses would expire at the same
time.  Holmes is the only one that's likely to squeal, because he's
paid his second fee, and the others have only a few months to run.
They'll make it up to Holmes, I reckon, rather'n have him give the snap
away.  Of course, Jap, I haven't got the goods for any of this.  I just
put two and two together while I was listening to the speeches,
especially my father's speech."

"Bill"--Jap laid his hand on Bill's arm--"you made the mistake of your
career when you picked that owl for a daddy.  He has made more trouble
than three towns could stand up against.  First, he throws the place
wide open and takes all the stray saloons and gambling dens to his
bosom; and just when we have a reputation for being the toughest town
on the road and doing a land-office business in sin, he is--he is fool
enough to try to pull off a stunt like this.  What becomes of his plea
for municipal revenue when he turns saloons into drug stores?"

"Well, the lid's going on," Bill returned.  "The preachers and the
ladies are strong for it, and the right honorable Mayor announced that
he was the Poo Bah that was going to put up the shutters."

"Better order a granite," Jap muttered, as he returned to the composing
room.

And his prediction was well founded, for the town had become so used to
its "morning's morning" that it fairly ravened for the blood of Mayor
Bowers.  The _Herald_ office became a forum for indignant orators,
while the Mayor strutted proudly up and down Main street, with the
black-coated Parsons, feeling that the eyes of the world were glued on
him.

"Parsons!  Bah!" spluttered Kelly Jones, who had driven four miles with
his empty jug.  "Ef the town has got any git-up, it'll ride him and
that old jackass of a mayor on a rail."

"Judge Bowers is the honored father of our Associate Editor," informed
Jap gravely.

As Bill looked up he thumped the galley he was carrying against the
case and pied the whole column.  After he had said what he thought
about the catastrophe, Kelly grinned appreciatively.

"Them's my sentiments, Bill.  Ef you love your pappy, you'd better let
him go, along of Parsons, 'cause there's goin' to be doings around
Bloomtown that'll hurt his pride.  Parsons!  They say out our way that
his right name's Wamkiss."

The turgid tide of popular sentiment caused Mayor Bowers some
uneasiness; but before anything could happen five new drug stores were
opened for business and things moved placidly along again.  Barton
began to refer to "our neighbor, Bumtown," and it was reported that two
blind tigers prowled in the environs of the railroad station.

"Bill," said Jap one morning, "this won't do.  We'll have to raise hell
in this town.  This is Ellis's town, and we're not going to let a
dod-blinged mugwump like your asinine daddy ruin it.  Bill, if you have
got any speech to make, get ready.  If you can't stand for my program,
name your price, for the _Herald_ is going to everlastingly lambaste
William Bowers, Senior."

"Pull the throttle and run 'er wild," Bill retorted, as he ducked down
behind the press and dragged forth a box from the corner.  "I'm going
to get out that last lot of cuts that Ellis made," he continued.
"Kelly Jones knows sense.  If I remember right, Ellis had twenty-five
cuts of jacks for the stock bill.  We will stick every blamed one of
'em in next week's issue, and label 'em Mayor Bowers.  He has killed
the town with his ideas.  What can we do with him but hang him?"

When the _Herald_ appeared the following Thursday afternoon, the town
quit business to read the war cry of Ellis's boy.  It was a flaming
sword, hurled at the Board of Aldermen.  Bowers, foaming with wrath,
stormed into the office.

"You take all that back," he yelled, "or I'll put you out of this here
building.  I've told you times enough this office belongs to me.  I
never turned it over to Ellis."

Jap stuck type, deadly calm on the surface of his being.  Bill shifted
uneasily, his hands clinched, his ruddy face glowing.

"You hear me?" bawled the irate Mayor.

Jap turned to consult his copy.  Before the act could be imagined
Bowers had struck him over the head with the revolver he dragged from
his pocket.  Jap fell, crumpling to the floor, the blood spurting
across the type.  For an instant there was horrified silence.  Then,
with a howl like that of a wild beast, Bill threw himself upon his
father.  But for the intervention of Tom Granger, who had followed the
Mayor because he scented trouble, there would have been a quick finish
to the pompous career of Bill Bowers's progenitor, for Bill had wrested
the pistol from his father's hand and was pressing it against the
temple of the worst scared coward Bloomtown had ever seen.  There was a
sharp tussle between the broad-shouldered banker and the frenzied
youth.  Several men rushed in from the street.

"Let me go!" shouted Bill, "for if he's killed Jap he's got to die."

They were carrying Jap out of the composing room, limp and bleeding.

"Let him alone, Bill," Tom counselled wisely.  "Let your father alone,
for if Jap is dead, we'll lynch him."

Jap was pretty weak when they brought the Mayor's resignation up from
the calaboose for him to read.  A representative delegation stood
around his bed.

"Let the Judge out, for Bill's sake," Jap said.

"We'd better keep him locked up for his own sake," declared Tom
Granger.  "For in Bill's present frame of mind he's likely to make an
orphan of himself."

Flossy came in from the little sitting-room and leaned over the bed.

"I am going to see Brother William," she said quietly.  "I am going to
take Brent Roberts with me.  William will give you boys a quitclaim
bill to this property, for this dastardly deed."

She was an impersonation of righteous wrath as she swept into the jail,
followed by Bloomtown's leading attorney.  Judge Bowers had said more
than once that Flossy had a willing tongue, but its full willingness
was never conceived until she descended upon him that eventful day.

An arrangement, made by Ellis just before his departure, gave the
contents of the office to the boys, on regular payments to Flossy.  The
ground on which the new building stood had been deeded to Ellis and
Flossy on their wedding day; but the building, presumed to be a gift to
Ellis, had been reclaimed by Bowers; it was held, however, as Bill's
share in the firm.  As yet no occasion had arisen that demanded the
settling of the question of ownership.  Whenever the Judge had an
attack of bile he came into the office to remind Bill and Jap that the
building was still his.

For one heated hour Flossy detailed the past, present and future of her
cowering brother.  When she left him he was a wiser, and probably a
sadder, man, for she had deprived him of his weapon.

There was a big bonfire on the circus grounds, and a celebration in
Court House Square that night.  The next day there was a great vacuum
in the City Hall, for the Board of Aldermen resigned unanimously.  A
special election was called, and before Jap was strong enough to sit at
his case he had been elected Mayor of Bloomtown.

He looked sadly from the window of his bedroom, after the joyous crowd
of serenaders that had come to congratulate him.  Bill had followed in
their wake, to escort Rosy home.  It was late.  The clock in the
Presbyterian church spire chimed twelve, as he stood alone.  He took
his hat from the rack and went cautiously downstairs.  On the pavement
he paused a moment to steady himself.  His head still reeled after any
unwonted exertion.  Then he walked slowly up Main street, across the
railroad tracks, and out to the quiet village whose inhabitants slept
'neath marble and sod.  Standing beside the grave of his first friend,
he said:

"Ellis, make the town proud of your boy.  Help me to be your right
hand.  If I can only fulfill your plan, I am willing that no other
ambition be fulfilled."

A lonely night bird called softly.  The willow branches waved in the
breeze.  Thick darkness hung over the City of the Dead.  Suddenly the
moon peered through the clouds, flooding the night with beauty, and Jap
read from the stone the last message of Ellis:

"I go, but not as one unsatisfied.  In God's plan, my work will live."




CHAPTER XIII

"Now that you've got it, Jap," asked Tom Granger, "what are you going
to do with it?"  Jap looked silently from the door.

"He put in about eight hours of thinking about that himself," Bill
averred.  "News is that ten saloons are loaded on freight cars, waiting
word from Jap."

"You'll have to strike a happy medium," suggested Tom.  "I know that
you are the boy to deliver the goods."

"Ellis wasn't against saloons," commented Bill, "so Jap won't have that
to chew over.  Ellis wasn't either for or against 'em."

"No," Tom said seriously, "Ellis was dead set against hypocrisy.  He
hated a liar and a grafter worse than a murderer.  He knew that the way
to make people want a thing was to tell 'em they couldn't have it."

Jap's face was grave.  A panorama of wretched pictures moved slowly
before his wandering gaze, pictures that began and ended in Mike's
place, in the half-forgotten village of Happy Hollow.  He aroused
himself with a start.

"I'm going to put it up to the new Board to allow as many saloons as
want to, to come in," he said shortly.

Tom Granger let go a shrill whistle.

"At the license asked," continued Jap calmly.  "The license will be
three thousand dollars a year, and strict enforcement of all laws.  At
the first break, the lid will fall."

"Jumping cats!" howled Tom.  "Where will you get the saloon that'll pay
that?"

Jap smiled wearily.  "I am not hunting a saloon for Bloomtown," he
said, and turned toward the door in time to bump into Isabel Granger,
her arms full of bundles.  She blushed and dimpled prettily.

"I am looking for my papa," she cried, pinching Tom's cheek with her
one free hand.  "I want you to carry these packages for me."

"Run along, pet.  I'm busy."

"You look it," she reproved.  "I simply can't carry all these things.
My arm is almost broken now, and the dressmaker has to have them."

"Jap will tote them for you," chuckled Tom, watching the blood rush
over Jap's sensitive face.  To his surprise, Jap took the bundles and
walked out with Isabel.  He looked after them approvingly.

"Now there goes the likeliest boy in the state," he declared.  "It's
plumb funny the way he's got of getting right next to your marrow
bones.  I wish I had a boy like him."

"No great matter," drawled Bill, with tantalizing indefiniteness.

Tom looked up at him quizzically, as he picked absently at the pile of
exchanges.  Something in the young man's tone piqued him.

"If Jap wasn't so all-fired conscientious," Bill blurted, "you'd have a
son, in quick order."

"Lord!" exploded Tom.  "Dunderhead that I am!"  He slapped his thigh,
and a great, joyous laugh set his shoulders to heaving.  "Bill, you're
a genius for spying out mysteries.  How did you get on to it?"

"Mysteries!" shouted Bill.  "Why, everybody in Bloomtown, including
Isabel, knows that Jap is fairly sapheaded about her."

"Well, what's hampering him?" inquired Tom.  "Why don't he confide in
me?"

"Confide your hat!" remarked Bill crisply.  "Isabel will die of old age
before Jap asks her.  You see, he is such a durn fool that he thinks he
isn't good enough for her.  When the Lord made Jap Herron He made a
man, I tell you!"

"Who said He didn't?" stormed Tom.  "I can't know what is in the boy's
mind, can I?  What do you want me to do, kidnap him and get his
consent?  Bill, you're a fool.  You needn't tell me that Jap Herron is
such a mealy-mouth."

"All I know is that he won't ask Isabel," Bill said gloomily.  "I'd
like to get married myself, but as long as Jap stays single, I stick
too."  And thinking of Rosy's blue eyes, he sighed heavily.

"It beats me, the way young folks do.  It was different when I went
courting," Tom muttered, turning to go.

At the door he met Kelly Jones, who had come in to inquire what Jap
intended to do about the "licker" business.  He was too busy with his
fall plowing to be running over to Barton for his jug of good cheer,
and he didn't like the brand he could get at Bingham's drug store, on
Doc Connor's prescription.  While he was still holding forth, Jap came
in, with half-a-dozen constituents, all busy with the same problem.
Bill took up his notebook and wandered out.  At Blanke's drug store he
met Isabel.  She motioned for him to come back in the store.

"What do you want to know, Iz?" he asked with the familiarity born of
long years of propinquity.  "Reckon you want to ask what everybody else
wants to know--when is Jap going to get a saloon?"

"You are too smart, Bill Bowers," she retorted, with annoyance.  She
had had a subject of more personal nature on the tip of her tongue.  "I
think that Jap will be able to answer his own questions without any
help from you."

"It is to be hoped that he will make a better stagger at answering than
he does at asking," remarked Bill shortly.

"Now, Bill Bowers, just what do you mean?" she demanded, her black eyes
flashing angrily.

"What's the use?" said Bill, in disgust.  "Rosy says that she's going
to Kansas this fall, and I just will have to let her go because I can't
ask her to stay."

"Pity about you," she snapped.  "Thought you said Jap couldn't ask."

"I did," assented Bill, "for if he had gumption enough to get married,
or even go courting, I might get by.  But as long as he sticks alone
I'm going to stick, too."

Isabel's face flamed.  She stooped to pick up a hit of paper.

"What do you want to tell me about it for?" she complained.  "My
goodness, I'm not to blame."

"You are," stormed Bill.  "Jap knows that he is not your equal, and he
never will marry."

"Who said that Jap Herron was not more than the equal of any man on
earth?" she blazed.  "If Jap will ask me, I'll marry him to-morrow."

She whirled away in her wrath, and ran into the arms of Jap Herron,
standing half paralyzed with the wonder of it.  Bill, who had been
watching the unconscious Jap approaching for several minutes,
discreetly withdrew.

"Gee!" he said, "but they ought not to be kissing in such a public
place."

There were a dozen customers in the store, but neither Jap nor Isabel
knew it.  And it is to the credit of Bloomtown that they all looked the
other way, as they hurriedly transacted their business and departed.
Blanke declared afterward that he filled fifteen prescriptions with
epsom salts in his abstraction, and accidentally cured Doc Horton's
best paying patient.  Moss, the paper hanger, went out with his rolls
of paper, and hung the border on the walls, instead of the siding.  The
mistakes reported were legion; but the town was all courting Isabel
with Jap, at heart.

Bill rambled into the bank and suggested that Tom go over to Blanke's
and lead Jap and Isabel out, as Blanke might want to close the store.
Half an hour later Tom came from the drug store, with an arm locked
with each of the glowing pair.  Straight across Main street they
marched, and down the shady walk that flanked the little park until
they were opposite the front gate of the Granger home.  Then they went
in to break the news to Isabel's invalid mother.

Flossy heard about it, almost before Jap had awakened to his own joy,
and he never knew of the hour she spent in passionate grief.  In some
vague way it seemed to tear open the old wound.  Without knowing why,
she resented the fact that Isabel's brunette beauty had won Jap.  She
told herself that it was not a fitting match for him.  Flossy, in her
maternal soul, had looked to heights undreamed of by the retiring boy.
She had planned a future for him that would be sadly hampered by
marriage with a village belle.  But only smiles met him when he brought
Isabel to her, his plain features glorified by joy in her possession.

Somehow the story of Jap Herron, the youthful Mayor of Bloomtown, his
advent in its environs, and the story of his romance with the banker's
daughter, crept into the country press, was carried over into the city
papers and flung broadcast, so that friend and foe might seek him out.
One dreary fall day, when the rain was beating sullenly down on the
sodden leaves, a haggard, dirty woman straggled into the office.

"I'm lookin' for Jasper Herron," she mumbled.  "They told me I'd find
him in here."

Jap looked at her in horror.  His heart sank.

"I am his poor old mother, that he run away from and left to starve,"
she said viciously.

And Jap, just on the threshold of his greatest happiness, was turned
aside by this grizzly, drunken phantom from the past.




CHAPTER XIV

Little J. W. crawled out from under Bill's case, his brown eyes wide
with surprise at this vagrant who called Jap "son."

"Run like sin," counselled Bill, in a whisper, "and bring your mother.
She will know what to do."

While the boy went to do his bidding, Bill slipped out of the rear door
of the office and was waiting in front of the bank when Flossy came
hurrying along.

"Oh, Bill, what has Jap said?" she asked breathlessly.  From J. W.'s
lisping description--he always lisped when he was excited--she had come
to fear the worst.

"Nothing," said Bill bluntly.  "He's sitting at his case, sticking type
as if he was hired by the minute."

"And she--that awful woman?"

"Gee!"  Bill spat the word.  "You don't know anything yet.  Wait till
you lamp her over."

"That bad, Bill?"

"Worse," muttered Bill.  And when Flossy came inside and looked into
the little inner office where the woman sprawled, half asleep and
muttering incoherently, the fumes of liquor and the presence of filth
all too evident, her stomach rebelled and she retreated swiftly.
Softly she slipped into the composing room through the wide-open door.
Timidly she approached Jap and touched his arm.  He looked at her with
eyes utterly hopeless.

"Oh, Jap, what can I do!"

"You cannot do anything," his voice flat and emotionless.  "No one can.
Could you take her in?  No!  She is impossible, and yet--she is my
mother.  Perhaps if I had stayed with her it would have been different,
so I must make up for it."

Flossy looked into his set face in affright.

"I am going away--with her."  Jap's tones were calm.  "You can see,
Flossy, that it is the only way.  I cannot be Mayor of Ellis's town
with such a disgrace to shame me.  I must give up Isabel and--and the
_Herald_."

Flossy clung to his arm.

"Listen to me, Jap Herron," she cried shrilly.  "You shall not do it!
You shall not let this horrible old woman drag you down in the dirt."

Jap smiled sadly.

"What could I do, Flossy?  She must be cared for.  She has been all
over town.  Everybody has seen her.  They know the truth, that my
mother is--what she is."

Suddenly he threw himself forward on the case and began to sob, such
hard, racking sobs as might tear his very breast.  Flossy threw her
arms around him and cried aloud.  Bill stood in the little private
office, looking down upon the snoring woman with a murderous glare.  He
turned as Tom Granger came noiselessly from the outer office and stood
beside him.  Grief was in Granger's face.

"I heard what Jap said just now," he whispered, "and he is right.  It
would be impossible for him to stay with her in the town.  She has
ruined Jap."

"You're a gol-dinged fool," shouted Bill, dragging him across the big
office and out of the front door.  "Pretty sort of friend you are,
anyway.  I'll fight you, or a half-dozen like you, if you murmur a word
like that to Jap."

He whirled as his father ambled up the street, his round face wearing a
grin.

"What is that greasy smirk for?" demanded Bill.  "If you have any
business in the _Herald_ office, spit it out."

"I knowed it would come out sooner or later," spluttered Bowers,
shifting his position to avoid a pool in the pavement, left by the
recent rain.  "With half an eye, anybody could see the mongrel streak
in----"

He stopped as his son advanced swiftly toward him.

"What kind of a streak?" he threatened.  "I dare you to say that again,
and hitch anybody's name to it."

"Why, William," expostulated his father, "you shorely ain't goin' to
have Jap and his mammy hitched up to the _Herald_?  Barton 'll ride
Bloomtown proper."

"It will give Jones a whack at the _Herald_," suggested Granger mildly.

"And it will be his last whack!" foamed Bill.  "For I'll finish him and
his filthy paper before I go to the pen for burning down the _Herald_
office.  The day that Jap Herron leaves the _Herald_, there will be the
hell-firedest bonfire that Bloomtown ever saw!"  His eyes were blazing.
"Get away from here," he cried fiercely, "you--you milksop friends!"

He stopped as Isabel, her eyes swollen from crying, crossed the street.
She had come across the corner of the park, and her face was white and
drawn.  Bill stepped up into the doorway and awaited her.

"I want to speak to Jap," she said, as he barred the passage.

"What do you want with him?" Bill demanded truculently.  "Because he is
packing all the load now that he can stand, and you ain't going to add
another chip to it.  Give me your old engagement ring, and I'll pitch
it in the hell-box.  I reckon that's what you came for."

She pushed him aside, her eyes blazing with wrath.

"Get out of my way, Bill Bowers.  You never did have any sense.  Let me
by!"

She flung herself past him and ran into the composing room.  At sight
of Flossy, she paused.  Flossy raised her head from Jap's shoulder and
looked defiantly at the girl, but only for a second.  She knew, in that
glance.  Softly she crept out as Isabel, with a heart-shaking cry, ran
to Jap and threw herself against him.

"Take me in your arms, Jap," she cried stormily, "for I love you."

Jap stared up, dully, for an instant.  Then, forgetting all but love,
he opened his arms and clasped her to his heart.  Bill rushed outside
after Flossy.

"I never knew that she was the real goods," he said remorsefully,
wiping his eyes.

"Get a wagon from the grocer," Flossy said, decisive again.  "I am
going to take her home with me."

"Meaning that?"  Bill flipped his thumb toward Jap's mother.

"Send her up to the house, and I will have a doctor, and some one to
bathe her and clean her up.  Maybe after she is clean and sober, she
won't be so dreadful."

When Jap came out of his stupor enough to try to put Isabel away, he
discovered what Flossy had done.  With Isabel clinging to him, he
walked with downcast head through the streets that lay between the
_Herald_ office and Flossy's cottage.

His mother was in bed, clean and yet disgusting in her drunken sleep.
He forgot Isabel, silent by his side, as he stood looking down upon the
blotched and sunken face, thinking what thoughts God only knew.  He
seemed years older as he walked out again, after the doctor had told
him that nothing could be determined until she had slept the liquor
off.  Slowly and silently he and Isabel walked past the row of neat
cottages until they reached Main street.  On the corner Jap paused.

"You must go home, Isabel," he said brokenly.  "Sweetheart, I
understand, and I know that you are the bravest girl in the world.  But
you must leave me now."

"I will not," she declared.  "I want you to take me right down to the
office and send for a license.  I am going to marry you, and show this
town what I think of you!"

"But I cannot let you," Jap said simply.  "I know--you don't."

"Then," said Isabel defiantly, "I will go back to Flossy's and take
care of your mother until you are ready to talk sense."

Jap looked at her helplessly.  They were in front of Blanke's drug
store.  Jim Blanke stepped outside and grasped Jap's hand.  Isabel
looked proudly up at him, her arm drawn tightly through Jap's.  As they
passed down the street, citizens sprang up, apparently from nowhere,
and clasped Jap's hand in a fraternal grip.  Isabel peered into his
silent face.  The tears were streaming unheeded down his cheeks.  Her
father frowned as they appeared at the door of the bank.

"Papa," she called resolutely, "you coming with us?"

He stood gnawing at his lips, his face overcast.  An instant he battled
with his pride and his love for the boy.  Then, with his old
heartiness, he clapped Jap on the shoulder.

"Straighten your shoulders, lad.  We're all your friends!"  And the
storm cloud lightened.

All that night Jap paced the floor of the office, while Bill, too
sympathetic for sleep, tossed in the room above and swore at fate.  It
was noon the next day when little J. W. came in to say that Mrs. Herron
was awake and wanted to see her son.

She was half sitting among the pillows when Jap entered.  Flossy had
drawn the muslin curtains, to soften the garish light as it fell on her
seamed and shame-scarred face.  She peered up at him from blood-shot,
sunken eyes.

"You look like your pappy's folks, Jasper," she croaked.  "And they
tell me you air a fine, likely boy, and follerin' in the trade of your
gran'pap.  I wisht that I had a known where you was, long ago.  I have
had a hard life, Jasper.  Your step-pa beat me, and that's more'n your
pappy ever done.  He died of the trimmins, three year ago, and I have
been wanderin' every since, huntin' my childurn.  But Aggie's a bigbug
now, and she drove me off.  And Fanny's goin' to a fine music school,
and sent me word that she'd have me put in a sanitary if I bothered
her.  She saw a piece about you in the paper, and sent it to me.  So I
tramped thirty mile to come."

Her face was pathetic in its misery.  She sank back in the pillows and
closed her eyes.  Jap leaned down and drew the covers tenderly over her
arms.  She opened her eyes, at the touch, and looked up at him sadly.

"Thanky, Jasper," she mumbled,  "You be-ant mad?"

He patted her cheek softly, and the sunken eyes lighted with a smile of
weary contentment.  Then the lids fluttered, like the last effort of a
spent candle, and she slept.  Like one in the maze of a vague,
uncertain dream, Jap went back to the office.  Unconsciously he took
the familiar way, through the alley.  Automatically he climbed to his
stool and began setting up the editorial that had been interrupted by
his mother's coming the previous day.


At sunset Bill touched his shoulder softly.  Jap raised his head from
his hands.

"Your--your mother never woke up after you left her, Jap," he said
huskily.




CHAPTER XV

Bill looked up as a long, lank form glided surreptitiously into the
office.

"Been a long time since you drifted our way," he commented, as the form
resolved itself into the six-foot length of Kelly Jones.

"Might' nigh three month," averred Kelly grimly.  "I've been tradin'
over at Barton.  Couldn't stand for Jap's damfoolishness.  Had to buy
my licker there, and just traded there.  It's twelve mile from my farm
to Barton, and four mile to Bloomtown.  Spring's comin' on, and work to
do.  I hate to take that trip every time the wife needs a spool o'
thread.  Did you get my letter, sayin' to stop the paper?"

"Stopped it, didn't we?" queried Bill crisply, scattering the type from
the financial report of Bloomtown into the case.

"Yes," assented Kelly, "you did.  What'd you do it for?"

"Not forcing the _Herald_ on anybody," announced Bill glibly.  "Got
past that.  We used to hold 'em up and feed the _Herald_ to them, but
we don't have to do it now."

"I hear tell that Jap made Tim Simpson night marshal.  Why, he run a
blind tiger beyond the water tank," exclaimed Kelly.  "I reckon Jap
didn't know that."

"Just because he did know it, he made Tim night marshal," declared
Bill, flinging the last type into the box and descending from the
stool.  "Just you stroll down the tracks in either direction, and see
if you can find a whisker or a tawny hair from the tip of any tiger's
tail lying loose along the way.  Jap knows several things, Kelly, my
boy, and he is fighting fire with fire.  Tim Simpson understands the
operations of the kind of menagerie that usually flourishes in a dry
town, and Jap put him on his honor.  He's so conscientious that he goes
over to Barton to get full.  He won't drink it here.  He's got pride in
making Bloomtown the whitest town in the state.  But explain the return
of the prodigal.  How come your feet in our dust again?"

"Well," said Kelly shamefacedly, "the wife said that I was a durn fool.
I stopped the _Herald_ and subscribed for the _Standard_--and a pretty
standard it is!  While Jap Herron was cleanin' up, it was slingin' muck
at him.  The wife read it, and one day she goes up to Barton and starts
an argument with Jones.  I reckon she had the last word.  If she
didn't, it was the fu'st time.  She come home so rip-snortin' mad that
she threatened to lick me if I didn't tackle Jones.  Well, to keep
peace in the family, I run in to see him the next time I went to
Barton.  Well, Jones put it up to me, if Jap was doin' much for
Bloomtown in havin' unlicensed drug stores, instid of regular saloons."

"Sure sign that you don't know the news," said Bill, unfolding a copy
of the _Herald_.  "Since last Saturday night there has been only one
drug store in Bloomtown.  That's Blanke's, and Jim Blanke wouldn't sell
liquor on anybody's prescription but Doc Hall's, and Doc Hall would let
you die of snake-bite, if nothing but whiskey would cure you.  Any
other drug stores that may open up in this town 'll have to pattern
after Blanke's or out they go."

Kelly took the paper up and scanned its columns.  He snorted.

"Well, I do declare!  I see that might' nigh all the doctors have
packed up and are threatenin' to leave town.  Well, there wa'n't enough
doctorin' to keep twenty of 'em in cash nohow."

"You ought to have heard Jap's speech when they were putting a plea for
local option," said Bill.  "My pap has carried a sore ear against Jap's
reign ever since he was elected to fill out that unexpired term, and he
stirred up a lot of bellyaches among the guzzlers.  It was a sickening
mess, because the whole town knows that my daddy can't stand even the
smell of liquor.  It wouldn't be so bad--so hypocritical, if he really
liked it and was used to it.  As I was telling you, he and the old
booze gang had been burning the midnight dip to plan a crimp for Mayor
Herron, when that local option idea struck him.  Well, Jap got up and
made a speech, calling their attention to the bonds we voted, and the
sound financial condition back of those bonds; the granitoid pavement
on Main street, the electric light plant that's going up, and the water
works, and sewers that are under way--all managed since the town went
dry.  Then he nominated Tom Granger for mayor, and what do you reckon
they did?"

"Seein' as how he ain't mayor," said Kelly, with a twinkle, "I allow
they done nothin'."

"Why," said Bill, his brown eyes kindling, "they arose as one man and
yelled, 'We want Jap Herron!' and that settled it."

The farmer stood in the middle of the office, his arms 

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