"We must remember, too," said his companion, thoughtfully, "there is the
Thursday issue of this week to be prepared, almost at once."
"Don't! Please don't mention that, Fisbee!" Parker tilted far back in
his chair with his feet anchored under the desk, preserving a precarious
balance. "I ain't as grateful for my promotion to joint Editor-in-Chief as
I might be. I'm a middling poor man for the hour, I guess," he remarked,
painfully following the peregrinations of a fly on his companion's sleeve.
Mr. Fisbee twisted up another sheet, and employed his eyes in following
the course of a crack in the plaster, a slender black aperture which
staggered across the dusty ceiling and down the dustier wall to disappear
behind a still dustier map of Carlow County. "That's the trouble!"
exclaimed Parker, observing the other's preoccupation. "Soon as you get to
writing a line or two that seems kind of promising, you begin to take a
morbid interest in that blamed crack. It's busted up enough copy for me,
the last eight days, to have filled her up twenty times over. I don't know
as I ever care to see that crack again. I turned my back on it, but there
wasn't any use in that, because if a fly lights on you I watch him like a
brother, and if there ain't any fly I've caught a mania for tapping my
teeth with a pencil, that is just as good."
To these two gentlemen, thus disengaged, reentered (after a much longer
absence than Miss Selina's quatrain justified) Mr. Ross Schofield, a
healthy glow of exertion lending pleasant color to his earnest visage, and
an almost visible laurel of success crowning his brows. In addition to
this imaginary ornament, he was horned with pencils over both ears, and
held some scribbled sheets in his hand.
"I done a good deal down there," he announced cheerfully, drawing up a
chair to the desk. "I thought up a heap of things I've heard lately, and
they'll fill up mighty well. That there poem of Miss Seliny's was a kind
of an inspiration to me, and I tried one myself, and it didn't come hard
at all. When I got started once, it jest seemed to flow from me. I didn't
set none of it up," he added modestly, but with evident consciousness of
having unearthed genius in himself and an elate foreknowledge of the treat
in store for his companions. "I thought I'd ort to see how you liked it
first." He offered the papers to Mr. Parker, but the foreman shook his
head.