Meanwhile, the stranger was seated in the dingy office upstairs with his
head bowed low on his arms. Twilight stole through the dirty window-panes
and faded into darkness. Night filled the room. He did not move. The young
man from the East had bought the "Herald" from an agent; had bought it
without ever having been within a hundred miles of Plattville. He had
vastly overpaid for it. Moreover, the price he had paid for it was all the
money he had in the world.
The next morning he went bitterly to work. He hired a compositor from
Rouen, a young man named Parker, who set type all night long and helped
him pursue advertisements all day. The citizens shook their heads
pessimistically. They had about given up the idea that the "Herald" could
ever amount to anything, and they betrayed an innocent, but caustic, doubt
of ability in any stranger.
One day the new editor left a note on his door; "Will return in fifteen
minutes."
Mr. Rodney McCune, a politician from the neighboring county of Gaines,
happening to be in Plattville on an errand to his henchmen, found the
note, and wrote beneath the message the scathing inquiry, "Why?"
When he discovered this addendum, the editor smiled for the first time
since his advent, and reported the incident in his next issue, using the
rubric, "Why Has the 'Herald' Returned to Life?" as a text for a rousing
editorial on "honesty in politics," a subject of which he already knew
something. The political district to which Carlow belonged was governed
by a limited number of gentlemen whose wealth was ever on the increase;
and "honesty in politics" was a startling conception to the minds of the
passive and resigned voters, who discussed the editorial on the street
corners and in the stores. The next week there was another editorial,
personal and local in its application, and thereby it became evident that
the new proprietor of the "Herald" was a theorist who believed, in
general, that a politician's honor should not be merely of that middling
healthy species known as "honor amongst politicians"; and, in particular,
that Rodney McCune should not receive the nomination of his party for
Congress. Now, Mr. McCune was the undoubted dictator of the district, and
his followers laughed at the stranger's fantastic onset.
But the editor was not content with the word of print; he hired a horse
and rode about the country, and (to his own surprise) he proved to be an
adaptable young man who enjoyed exercise with a pitchfork to the farmer's
profit while the farmer talked. He talked little himself, but after
listening an hour or so, he would drop a word from the saddle as he left;
and then, by some surprising wizardry, the farmer, thinking over the
interview, decided there was some sense in what that young fellow said,
and grew curious to see what the young fellow had further to say in the
"Herald."