CONTRABAND

Books by
CLARENCE BUDINGTON KELLAND

Youth Challenges
The High Flyers
The Little Moment of Happiness
Scattergood Baines
Conflict
Contraband
The Hidden Spring
The Source
Sudden Jim

HARPER & BROTHERS
Publishers

CONTRABAND

By
Clarence Budington Kelland
Author of
“YOUTH CHALLENGES” “THE HIGH FLYERS”
“THE LITTLE MOMENT OF HAPPINESS”
“SCATTERGOOD BAINES”
“CONFLICT” ETC.

Harper & Brothers Publishers
New York and London

CONTRABAND

First Edition
A-X

CONTRABAND

CHAPTER I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Shake,” said Tubal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sell? Sell this here rag?... Say!”

“Why not, I’d like to know?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Mornin’,” said Tubal.

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

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

“Why?” replied Tubal.

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

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

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

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

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

“What d’ye mistrust?” asked Tubal.

“You hain’t seen him?”

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“On time,” said Tubal.

“And her comin’ on it,” said Simmy.

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

“’Tain’t her,” said Tubal.

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

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

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

“Yes ’m. What kin we do for you?”

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

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

“I,” she answered.

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

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

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

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

He nodded dumbly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Here I be.... Say, when do we quit?”

“Quit? Quit what?”

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

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

“Say, you gone crazy, or what?”

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

CHAPTER II

CARMEL LEE had been told by everybody, ever since she could remember being told anything, that she was headstrong and impulsive. Her parents had impressed it upon her and, rather proudly, had disseminated the fact among the neighbors until it became a tradition in the little Michigan town where she was born. People held the idea that one must make allowances for Carmel and be perpetually ready to look with tolerance on outbursts of impulse. Her teachers had accepted the tradition and were accustomed to advise with her upon the point. The reputation accompanied her to the university, and only a few weeks before, upon her graduation, the head of the Department of Rhetoric (which included a course in journalism) spent an entire valuable hour beseeching her to curb her willfulness and to count as high as fifty before she reached a decision.

So Carmel, after being the victim of such propaganda for sixteen or seventeen years, could not be censured if she believed it herself. She had gotten to be rather afraid of Carmel and of what Carmel might do unexpectedly. Circumspection and repression had become her watchwords, and the present business of her life was to look before she leaped. She had made a vow of deliberation. As soon as she found herself wanting to do something she became suspicious of it; and latterly, with grim determination, she had taken herself in hand. Whenever she became aware of a desire to act, she compelled herself to sit down and think it over. Not that this did a great deal of good, but it gave her a very pleasing sensation of self-mastery. As a matter of fact, she was not at all introspective. She had taken the word of bystanders for her impulsiveness; it was no discovery of her own. And now that she was schooling herself in repression, she did not perceive in the least that she failed to repress. When she wanted to do a thing, she usually did it. The deliberation only postponed the event. When she forced herself to pause and scrutinize a desire, she merely paused and scrutinized it—and then went ahead and did what she desired.

It may be considered peculiar that a girl who had inherited a newspaper, as Carmel had done, should have paid so cursory a first visit. It would have been natural to rush into the shop with enthusiasm and to poke into corners and to ransack the place from end to end, and to discover exactly what it was she had become owner of. However, Carmel merely dropped in and hurried away.... This was repression. It was a distinct victory over impulse. She wanted to do it very much, so she compelled herself to turn her back and to go staidly to lunch at the hotel.

She ate very little and was totally unaware of the sensation she created in the dining room, especially over at the square table which was regarded as the property of visiting commercial travelers. It was her belief that she gave off an impression of dignity such as befitted an editor, and that a stern, businesslike air sat upon her so that none could mistake the fact that she was a woman of affairs. Truthfulness compels it to be recorded that she did not give this impression at all, but quite another one. She looked a lovely schoolgirl about to go canoeing with a box of bonbons on her lap. The commercial travelers who were so unfortunate as to be seated with their back toward her acquired cricks in their necks.

After dinner (in a day or two she would learn not to refer to it as luncheon) she compelled herself to go up to her room and to remain there for a full fifteen minutes. After this exercise, so beneficial to her will, she descended and walked very slowly to the office of the Free Press. Having thus given free rein to her bent for repression, she became herself and pounced. She pounced upon the office; she pounced upon the shop. She made friends with the cylinder press much as an ordinary individual would make friends with a nice dog, and she talked to the little job press as to a kitten and became greatly excited over the great blade of the paper cutter, and wanted Tubal to give her an instant lesson in the art of sticking type. For two hours she played with things. Then, of a sudden, it occurred to her to wonder if a living could be made out of the outfit.

It was essential that the paper should provide her with a living, and that it should go about the business of doing so almost instantly. At the moment when Carmel first set foot in Gibeon she was alone in the world. Old Man Nupley had been her last remaining relative. And—what was even more productive of unease of mind—she was the owner of exactly seventy-two dollars and sixteen cents!

Therefore she pounced upon the records of the concern and very quickly discovered that Old Man Nupley had left her no placer mine out of which she could wash a pan of gold before breakfast. She had, she found, become the owner of the right to pay off a number of pressing debts. The plant was mortgaged. It owed for paper; there were installments due on the job press; there were bills for this, that, and the other thing which amounted to a staggering total....

She was not daunted, however, until she examined the credit side of the affair. The year had brought the Free Press a grand total of five hundred and sixty-one paid subscriptions; the advertising, at the absurd rate of fifteen cents an inch, had been what politicians call scattering; and the job work had hardly paid for the trouble of keeping the dust off the press. The paper was dead on its feet, as so many rural weeklies are. She could not help thinking that her uncle Nupley had died in the nick of time to avoid bankruptcy.

It is worth recording that Carmel did not weep a tear of disappointment, nor feel an impulse to walk out of the place and go the thousand miles back to Michigan to take the job of teaching English in the home high school. No. The only emotion Carmel felt was anger. Her eyes actually glinted, and a red spot made its appearance upon each cheek. She had arrived in Gibeon with a glowing illusion packed in her trunk; unkind fact had snatched it away and replaced it with clammy reality.

She got up from her desk and walked into the shop, where Tubal was pretending to be busy.

“Gibeon is the county seat, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Yes ’m.”

“How many people live here?”

“We claim two thousand. Ol’ Man Nupley allowed the’ was four thousand in the township.”

“Then” (her manner put Tubal in the wrong at once and compelled him to fumble about for a defense) “why have we only a little more than five hundred subscribers?”

“Wa-al, one thing or another, seems as though. Folks never took to this paper much.... Mostly they take in the Standard from over to Litchfield.”

“Why?”

Tubal shifted the blame to Gibeon. “Seems like this hain’t much of a town.... It’s a dum funny town. I guess folks didn’t set much store by this paper on account of Abner Fownes.”

“Abner Fownes? Who is he, and what has he to do with it?”

“Abner,” said Tubal, “comes clost to bein’ a one-man band. Uh huh!... Owns the saw mills, owns half of Main Street, owns the Congo church and the circuit judge and the selectmen, and kind of claims to own all the folks that lives here.... Ol’ Man Nupley was a kind of errand boy of his’n.”

Carmel’s intuition carried her to the point. “And the people didn’t take this paper because they didn’t trust it. That was it, wasn’t it—because this Abner Fownes—owned Uncle Nupley.”

“I calc’late,” said Tubal, “you’re twittin’ on facts....” He chuckled. “Las’ fall the folks kind of riz ag’in’ Abner and dum nigh trompled on him at election time. Yes, sir. Made a fight fer it, but they didn’t elect nobody but one sheriff. Good man, too.... But Abner was too slick for ’em and he run off with all the other offices.... He holds a chattel mortgage onto this plant.”

“Is he a bad man?”

“Wa-al I dunno’s a feller could call him bad. Jest pig-headed, like, and got the idee nobody knows nothin’ but him. My notion is he gits bamboozled a lot. The Court House crowd tickles his ribs and makes him work for ’em. No, he hain’t bad. Deacon, and all that.”

“The local politicians flatter him and make use of the power his money gives him, is that it?”

“You hit the nail plumb on the head.”

“Who is the real boss?”

“Wa-al now, that’s kind of hard to say. Kind of a ring. Half a dozen of ’em. Calc’late Supervisor Delorme is close to bein’ the queen bee.”

She could visualize Abner Fownes, smug, fatuous, in a place of power which he did not know how to use, a figurehead and cat’s-paw for abler and wickeder men.... It must be confessed that her interest in him was not civic, but personal. He was, at that moment, of no importance to her except as the man who held a chattel mortgage on her plant and whose influence over her uncle had withered the possible prosperity of the paper.

She was saying to herself: “I’ve got to find a way. I’ve got to make a success of this. I can’t go back home and admit I couldn’t do it.... Everybody said I couldn’t run a paper. But I can. I can.”

The field was there, a prosperous town with a cultivated countryside to the south and rich forest lands to north and west. There was a sufficient population to support well a weekly paper; there was all of Main Street, two dozen merchants large and small, whose advertising patronage should flow in to the Free Press.

“What it needs,” she told herself, “is somebody to get behind and push.”

As a matter of fact she was convinced the failure of the paper was not due to Abner Fownes, nor to politics or outside influences, but to the lack of initiative and ability of her uncle. So much of the town as she had seen was rather pleasing; it had no appearance of resting over subterranean caverns of evil, nor had the men and women she saw on the streets the appearance of being ground down by one man’s wealth, or of smarting under the rule of an evil political ring. On the contrary, it seemed an ordinary town, full of ordinary people, who lived ordinary lives in reasonable happiness. She discounted Tubal’s disclosures and jumped to a conclusion. No, she told herself, if she proved adequate, there was no reason why she could not succeed where Uncle Nupley failed.

The telephone interrupted her reflections and she lifted the receiver.

“Is this the Free Press?” asked a voice.

“Yes.”

“Wait a moment, please.”

After some delay another voice, a large, important voice, repeated the question, and Carmel admitted a second time the identity of the paper.

“This,” said the voice, evidently impressed by the revelation it was making, “is Abner Fownes.”

“Yes,” said Carmel.

“Are you the young woman—Nupley’s niece?”

“I am.”

“Will you step over to my office at once, then. I want to see you?”

Carmel’s eyes twinkled and her brows lifted. “Abner Fownes,” she said. “The name has a masculine sound. Your voice is—distinctly masculine?”

“Eh?... What of it?”

“Why,” said Carmel, “the little book I studied in school says that when a gentleman wishes to see a lady he goes to her. I fear I should be thought forward if I called on you.”

“Not at all.... Not at all,” said the voice, and Carmel knew she had to deal with a man in whom resided no laughter.

“I shall be glad to see you whenever you find it convenient to call,” she said—and hung up the receiver.

As she turned about she saw a young man standing outside the railing, a medium-sized young man who wore his shoulders slightly rounded and spectacles of the largest and most glittering variety. The collar of his coat asked loudly to be brushed and his tie had the appearance of having been tied with one hand in a dark bedroom. He removed his hat and displayed a head of extraordinarily fine formation. It was difficult to tell if he were handsome, because the rims of his spectacles masked so much of his face and because his expression was one of gloomy wrath. Carmel was tempted to laugh at the expression because it did not fit; it gave the impression of being a left-over expression, purchased at a reduction, and a trifle large for its wearer.

“May I ask,” he said, in a voice exactly suited to his stilted diction, “if you are in charge of this—er—publication?”

“I am,” said Carmel.

“I wish,” said the young man, “to address a communication to the citizens of this village through the—er—medium of your columns.”

So this, thought Carmel, was the sort of person who wrote letters to newspapers. She had often wondered what the species looked like.

“On what subject?” she asked.

“Myself,” said he.

“It should be an interesting letter,” Carmel said, mischievously.

The young man lowered his head a trifle and peered at her over the rims of his glasses. He pursed his mouth and wrinkled one cheek, studying her as a naturalist might scrutinize some interesting, but not altogether comprehensible, bug. Evidently he could not make up his mind as to her classification.

“I fancy it will be found so,” he said.

“May I ask your name?”

He fumbled in an inner pocket and continued to fumble until it became an exploration. He produced numerous articles and laid them methodically upon the railing—a fountain pen, dripping slightly, half a dozen letters, a large harmonica, a pocket edition of Plato’s Republic, a notebook, several pencils, and a single glove. He stared at the glove with recognition and nodded to it meaningly, as much as to say: “Ah, there you are again.... Hiding as usual.” At last he extracted a leather wallet and from the wallet produced a card which he extended toward Carmel.

Before she read it she had a feeling there would be numerous letters upon it, and she was not disappointed. It said:

Evan Bartholomew Pell, A.B., Ph.D., LL.D., A.M.

“Ah!” said Carmel.

“Yes,” said the young man with some complacency.

“And your letter.”

“I am,” he said, “or, more correctly, I was, superintendent of schools in this village. There are, as you know, three schools only one of which gives instruction in the so-called high-school branches.”

“Indeed,” said Carmel.

“I have been removed,” he said, and stared at her with lips compressed. When she failed to live up to his expectations in her manifestations of consternation, he repeated his statement. “I have been removed,” he said, more emphatically.

“Removed,” said Carmel.

“Removed. Unjustly and unwarrantably removed. Autocratically and tyrannically removed. I am a victim of nepotism. I have, I fancy, proven adequate; indeed, I may say it is rare to find a man of my attainments in so insignificant a position.... But I have been cast out upon the streets arbitrarily, that a corrupt and self-seeking group of professional politicians may curry favor with a man more corrupt than themselves. In short and in colloquial terms, I have been kicked out to provide a place for Supervisor Delorme’s cousin.”

Carmel nodded. “And you wish to protest.”

“I desire to lay before the public my ideas of the obligation of the public toward its children in the matter of education. I desire to protest against glaring injustice. I desire to accuse a group of men willing to prostitute the schools to the level of political spoils. I wish to protest at being set adrift penniless.”

His expression as he uttered the word “penniless” was one of helpless bewilderment which touched Carmel’s sympathy.

“Penniless?” she said.

“I am no spendthrift,” he said, severely. “I may say that I am exceedingly economical. But I have invested my savings, and—er—returns have failed to materialize from the investment.”

“What investment?”

The young man eyed her a moment as if he felt her to be intruding unwarrantably in his private concerns, but presently determined to reply.

“A certain gold mine, whose location I cannot remember at the moment. It was described as of fabulous wealth, and I was assured the return from my investment of five hundred dollars would lift me above the sordid necessity of working for wages.... I regret to say that hitherto there has been no material assurance of the truth of the statements made to me.”

“Poor lamb!” said Carmel under her breath.

“I beg your pardon?”

Carmel shook her head. “So you are—out of a job—and broke?” she said.

“Broke,” he said, lugubriously, “is an exceedingly expressive term.”

“And what shall you do?”

He looked about him, at his feet, through the door into the shop, under the desk, at the picture on the wall in a helpless, bewildered way as if he thought his future course of action might be hiding some place in the neighborhood.

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” he said.

Carmel considered. Inexperienced as she was, new to the intrigues of Gibeon, she was able to perceive how the professor’s letter was loaded with dynamite—not for him, but for the paper which published it. Notwithstanding, it was her impulse to print it. Indeed, her mind was firmly made up to print it. Therefore she assumed an attitude of deliberation, as she had schooled herself to do.

“If you give me the letter,” she said, “I will read it and consider the wisdom of making it public.”

“I shall be obliged to you,” he said, and turned toward the door. Midway he paused. “If,” he said, “you chance to hear of a position—as teacher or otherwise—to which I may be adapted, I shall be glad to have you communicate with me.”

He moved again toward the door, opened it, paused again, and turned full to face Carmel. Then he made a statement sharply detached from the context, and astonishing not so much for the fact it stated as because of the man who stated it, his possible reasons for making the statement, and the abruptness of the change of subject matter.

“Sheriff Churchill has disappeared,” he said. Having made the statement, he shut the door after him and walked rapidly up the street.

CHAPTER III

CARMEL more than half expected Abner Fownes to appear in the office, but he did not appear. Indeed, it was some days before she caught so much as a casual glimpse of him on the street. But she was gathering information about him and about the town of Gibeon and the county of which it was the center. Being young, with enthusiasm and ideals, and a belief in the general virtue of the human race, she was not pleased.

She set about it to study Gibeon as she would have studied some new language, commencing with elementals, learning a few nouns and verbs and the local rules of the grammar of life. She felt she must know Gibeon as she knew the palm of her hand, if she were to coax the Free Press out of the slough into which it had slipped.

But it was not easy to know Gibeon, for Gibeon did not know itself. Like so many of our American villages, it was not introspective—even at election time. The tariff and the wool schedule and Wall Street received from it more attention than did keeping its own doorstep clean. It was used to its condition, and viewed it as normal. There were moments of excited interest and hot-blooded talk. Always there was an undercurrent of rumor; but it seemed to Carmel the town felt a certain pride in the iniquity of its politics. A frightful inertia resides in the mass of mankind, and because of this inertia tsars and princes and nobilities and Tammany Societies and bosses and lobbies and pork barrels and the supreme tyranny of war have existed since men first invented organization.... Sometimes it seems the world’s supply of energy is cornered by the ill-disposed. Rotten governments and administrations are tolerated by the people because they save the people the trouble of establishing and conducting something better.

In a few days Carmel perceived a great deal that was going on in Gibeon, and understood a little of it, and, seeing and understanding as she did, an ambition was born in her, the ambition to wake up Gibeon. This ambition she expressed to Tubal, who listened and waggled his head.

“One time,” he said, “I worked fer a reform newspaper—till it went into bankruptcy.”

“But look—”

“I been lookin’ a sight longer ’n’ you have, Lady.” At first he had called her Lady as a dignified and polite form of greeting. After that it became a sort of title of affection, which spread from Tubal to Gibeon. “I been lookin’ and seein’, and what I see is that they’s jest one thing folks is real int’rested in, and that’s earnin’ a livin’.”

“I don’t believe it, Tubal. I believe people want to do right. I believe everybody would rather do right and be good—if some one would just show them how.”

“Mebby, but you better let somebody else take the pointer and go to the blackboard. You got to eat three times a day, Lady, and this here paper’s got to step up and feed you. Look at it reasonable. What d’ye git by stirrin’ things up? Why, half a dozen real good folks claps their hands, but they don’t give up a cent. What d’ye git if you keep your hands off and let things slide? You git the county printin’, and consid’able advertisin’ and job work that Abner Fownes kin throw to you. You git allowed to eat. And there you be.... Take that letter of the perfessor’s, fer instance——”

“I’m going to print that letter if—if I starve.”

“Which is what the perfessor’s doin’ right now.... And where’s Sheriff Churchill? Eh? Tell me that.”

“Tubal, what is this about the sheriff? Has he really disappeared?”

“If you don’t b’lieve it, go ask his wife. The Court House crowd lets on he’s run off with a woman or mebby stole some county funds. They would.... But what woman? The’ wa’n’t no woman. And Churchill wa’n’t the stealin’ kind.”

“What do you think, Tubal?”

“Lady, I don’t even dast to think.”

“What will be done?”

“Nothin’.”

“You mean the sheriff of a county can disappear—and nothing be done about it?”

“He kin in Gibeon. Oh, you keep your eye peeled. Delorme and Fownes’ll smooth it over somehow, and the folks kind of likes it. Gives ’em suthin’ to talk about. Sure. When the’ hain’t no other topic they’ll fetch up the sheriff and argue about what become of him. But nobody’ll ever know—for sure.”

“I’m going to see Mrs. Churchill,” said Carmel, with sudden determination. “It’s news. It’s the biggest news we’ll have for a long time.”

“H’m!... I dunno. Deputy Jenney and Peewee Bangs they dropped in here a few days back and give me a tip to lay off the sheriff. Anyhow, everybody knows he’s gone.”

Carmel made no reply. She reached for her hat, put it on at the desirable angle, and went out of the door. Tubal stared after her a moment, fired an accurate salvo at a nail head in the floor, and walked back into the shop with the air of a man proceeding to face a firing squad.

Carmel walked rapidly up Main Street past the Busy Big Store and Smith Brothers’ grocery and Miss Gammidge’s millinery shop, rounding the corner on which was Field & Hopper’s bank. She cut diagonally across the Square, past the town pump, and proceeded to the little house next the Rink. The Rink had been erected some twenty-five years before during the roller-skating epidemic, but was now utilized as a manufactory of stepladders and plant stands and kitchen chairs combined in one article. This handy device was the invention of Pazzy Hendee, whose avocation was inventing, but whose occupation was constructing models of full-rigged ships. It was in the little house, square, with a mansard roof, that Sheriff Churchill’s family resided. Carmel rang the bell.

“Come in,” called a woman’s voice.

Carmel hesitated, not knowing this was Gibeon’s hospitable custom—that one had but to rap on a door to be invited to enter.

“Come in,” said the voice after a pause, and Carmel obeyed.

“Right in the parlor,” the voice directed.

Carmel turned through the folding doors to the right, and there, on the haircloth sofa, sat a stout, motherly woman in state. She wore her black silk with the air common to Gibeon when it wears its black silk. It was evident Mrs. Churchill had laid aside her household concerns in deference to the event, and, according to precedent, awaited the visits of condolence and curiosity of which it was the duty, as well as the pleasure, of her neighbors to pay.

“Find a chair and set,” said Mrs. Churchill, scrutinizing Carmel. “You’re the young woman that Nupley left the paper to, hain’t you?”

“Yes,” said Carmel, “and I’ve come to ask about your husband—if the subject isn’t too painful.”

“Painful! Laws! ’Twouldn’t matter how painful ’twas. Folks is entitled to know, hain’t they? Him bein’ a public character. Was you thinkin’ of havin’ a piece in the paper?”

“If you will permit,” said Carmel.

In spite of the attitude of state, in spite of something very like pride in being a center of interest and a dispenser of news, Carmel liked Mrs. Churchill. Her face was the face of a woman who had been a faithful helpmeet to her husband; of a woman who would be summoned by neighbors in illness or distress. Motherliness, greatness of heart, were written on those large features; and a fine kindliness, clouded by present sorrow, shone in her wise eyes. Carmel had encountered women of like mold. No village in America but is the better, more livable, for the presence and ready helpfulness of this splendid sisterhood.

“Please tell me about it,” said Carmel.

“It was like this,” said Mrs. Churchill, taking on the air of a narrator of important events. “The sheriff and me was sittin’ on the porch, talkin’ as pleasant as could be and nothin’ to give a body warnin’. We was kind of arguin’ like about my oldest’s shoes and the way he runs through a pair in less’n a month. The sheriff he was holdin’ it was right and proper boys should wear out shoes, and I was sayin’ it was a sin and a shame sich poor leather was got off on the public. Well, just there the sheriff he got up and says he was goin’ to pump himself a cold drink, and he went into the house, and I could hear the pump squeakin’, but no thought of anythin’. He didn’t come back, and he didn’t come back, so I got up, thinkin’ to myself, what in tunket’s he up to now and kind of wonderin’ if mebby he’d fell in a fit or suthin’.” Carmel took note that Mrs. Churchill talked without the air of punctuation marks. “I went out to the back door and looked, and the’ wa’n’t hide or hair of him in sight. I hollered, but he didn’t answer....” Mrs. Churchill closed her eyes and two great tears oozed between the tightly shut lids and poised on the uplands of her chubby cheeks. “And that’s all I know,” she said in a dull voice. “He hain’t never come back.”

“Have you any idea why he disappeared?”

“I got my idees. My husband was a man sot in his ways—not but what I could manage him when he needed managin’, and a better or more generous provider never drew the breath of life. But he calc’lated to do his duty. I guess he done it too well!”

“What do you mean, Mrs. Churchill?”

“The sheriff was an honest man. When the folks elected him they chose him because he was honest and nobody couldn’t move him out of a path he set his foot to travel. He was close mouthed, too, but I seen for weeks past he had suthin’ on his mind that he wouldn’t come out with. He says to me once, ‘If folks knew what they was livin’ right next door to!’ He didn’t say no more, but that was a lot for him....” Suddenly her eyes glinted and her lips compressed. “My husband was done away with,” she said, “because he was a good man and a smart man, and I’m prayin’ to God to send down vengeance on them that done it.”

She paused a moment and her face took on the grimness of righteous anger. “It’s reported to me they’re settin’ afoot rumors that he run off with some baggage—him that couldn’t bear me out of sight these dozen year; him that couldn’t git up in the mornin’ nor go to bed at night without me there to help him! They lie! I know my man and I trust him. He didn’t need no woman but me, and I didn’t need no man but him.... Some says he stole county money. They lie, too, and best for them they don’t make no sich sayin’s in my hearin’....”

“What do you think is at bottom of it all?”

Mrs. Churchill shook her head. “Some day it’ll all come out,” she said, and her word was an assertion of her faith in the goodness of God. There was a pause, and then woman’s heart cried out to woman’s heart for sympathy.

“I try to bear up and to endure it like he’d want me to. But it’s lonely, awful lonely.... Lookin’ ahead at the years to come—without him by me.... Come nighttime and it seems like I can’t bear it.”

“But—but he’ll come back,” said Carmel.

“Back! Child, there hain’t no back from where my husband’s gone.”

Somehow this seemed to Carmel a statement of authority. It established the fact. Sheriff Churchill would never return, and his wife knew it. Something had informed her past doubting. It gave Carmel a strange, uncanny sensation, and she sat silent, chilled. Then an emotion moved in her, swelled, and lifted itself into her throat. It was something more than mere anger, it was righteous wrath.

“Mrs. Churchill,” she said, “if this is true—the thing you believe—then there are men in Gibeon who are not fit to walk the earth. There is a thing here which must be crushed—unearthed and crushed.”

“If it is God’s will.”

“It must be God’s will. And if I can help—if I can do one single small thing to help——”

“Mebby,” said Mrs. Churchill, solemnly, “He has marked you out and set you apart as His instrument.”

“I want to think. I want to consider.” Carmel got to her feet. “I—— Oh, this is a wicked, cruel, cruel thing!...”

She omitted, in her emotion, any word of parting, and walked from the house, eyes shining, lips compressed grimly. In her ears a phrase repeated itself again and again—“Mebby He has set you apart as His instrument....”

On the Square she met Prof. Evan Bartholomew Pell, who first peered at her through his great beetle glasses and then confronted her.

“May I ask,” he said, brusquely, “what decision you have reached concerning my letter?”

“I am going to print it,” she said.

He was about to pass on without amenities of any sort whatsoever, but she arrested him.

“What are your plans?” she asked.

“I have none,” he said, tartly.

“No plans and no money?”

“That is a matter,” he said, “which it does not seem to me is of interest to anyone but myself.”

She smiled, perceiving now he spoke out of a boyish shame and pride, and perceiving also in his eyes an expression of worry and bewilderment which demanded her sympathy.

“No schools are open at this time of year,” she said.

“None. I do not think I shall teach again.”

“Why?”

“I don’t like school trustees,” he said, simply, and one understood how he regarded the genus school trustee as a separate classification of humanity, having few qualities in common with the general human race. “I—I shall work,” he said.

“At what? What, besides teaching, are you fitted to do?”

“I—I can dig,” he said, looking at her hopefully. “Anybody can dig. Men who dig eat—and have a place to sleep. What more is there?”

“A great deal more.... Have you no place to eat or sleep?” she said, suddenly.

“My landlady has set my trunk on the porch, and as for food, I breakfasted on berries.... They are not filling,” he added.

Carmel considered. In her few short days of ownership she had discovered the magnitude of the task of rehabilitating the Free Press. She had seen how she must be business manager, advertising solicitor, and editor, and that any of the three positions could well demand all of her time. It would be useless to edit a paper, she comprehended, if there was no business to support it. Contrariwise, it would be impossible to get business for a paper as futile as the Free Press was at that moment in its history.

“How,” she said, “would you like to be an editor—a kind of an editor?”

“I’d like it,” he said. “Then I could say to the public the things I’d like to say to the public. You can’t educate them. They don’t care. They are sunk in a slough of inertia with a rock of ignorance around their necks. I would like to tell them how thick-headed they are. It would be a satisfaction.”

“I’m afraid,” said Carmel, “you wouldn’t do for an editor.”

“Why not, I should like to know?”

“Because,” said Carmel, “you don’t know very much.”

She could see him swell with offended dignity. “Good morning,” he said, and turned away without lifting his hat.

“And you have very bad manners,” she added.

“Eh?... What’s that?”

“Yes. And I imagine you are awfully selfish and self-centered. You don’t think about anybody but yourself, do you? You—you imagine the universe has its center in Prof. Evan Bartholomew Pell, and you look down on everybody who hasn’t a lot of degrees to string after his name. You don’t like people.” She paused and snapped a question at him. “How much did they pay you for being superintendent of schools?”

“Fifteen hundred dollars a year,” he said, the answer being surprised out of him.

“Doesn’t that take down your conceit?”

“Conceit!... Conceit!...”

“Yes—a good carpenter earns more than that. The world can’t set such a high value on you if it pays a mechanic more than it does you.”

“I told you,” he said, impatiently, “that the world is silly and ignorant.”

“It is you who are silly and ignorant.”

“You—you have no right to talk to me like this. You—you are forward and—and impertinent. I never met such a young woman.”

“It’s for the good of your soul,” she said, “and because—because I think I’m going to hire you to write editorials and help gather news. Before you start in, you’ve got to revise your notions of the world—and of yourself. If you don’t like people, people won’t like you.”

Evidently he had been giving scant attention to her and plenary consideration to himself. “How much will you pay me?” he asked.

“There you are!... I don’t know. Whatever I pay you will be more than you are worth.”

He was thinking about himself again, and thinking aloud.

“I fancy I should like to be an editor,” he said. “The profession is not without dignity and scholarly qualities——”

“Scholarly fiddlesticks!”

Again he paid her no compliment of attention. “Why shouldn’t one be selfish? What does it matter? What does anything matter? Here we are in this world, rabbits caught in a trap. We can’t escape. We’re here, and the only way to get out of the trap is to die. We’re here with the trap fastened to our foot, waiting to be killed. That’s all. So what does anything matter except to get through it somehow. Nobody can do anything. The greatest man who ever lived hasn’t done a thing but live and die. Selfish? Of course I’m selfish. Nothing interests me but me. I want to stay in the trap with as little pain and trouble as I can manage.... Everything and everybody is futile.... Now you can let me be an editor or you can go along about your business and leave me alone.”

“You have a sweet philosophy,” she said, cuttingly. “If that is all your education has given you, the most ignorant scavenger on the city streets is wiser and better and more valuable to the world than you. I’m ashamed of you.”

“Scavenger!...” His eyes snapped behind his beetle glasses and he frowned upon her terribly. “Now I’m going to be an editor—the silly kind of an editor silly people like. Just to show you I can do it better than they can. I’ll write better pieces about Farmer Tubbs painting his barn red, and better editorials about the potato crop. I’m a better man than any of them, with a better brain and a better education—and I’ll use my superiority to be a better ass than any of them.”

“Do you know,” she said, “you’ll never amount to a row of pins until you really find a desire to be of use to the world? If you try to help the world, sincerely and honestly, the world finds it out and helps you—and loves you.... Don’t you want people to like you?”

“No.”

“Well, when you can come to me and tell me you do want people to like you, I’ll have some hopes of you.... Report at the office at one o’clock. You’re hired.”

She walked away from him rapidly, and he stood peering after her with a lost, bewildered air. “What an extraordinary young woman!” he said to himself. Carmel seated herself at her desk to think. Her eyes glanced downward at the fresh blotter she had put in place the day before, and there they paused, for upon its surface lay a grimy piece of paper upon which was printed with a lead pencil:

Don’t meddle with Sheriff Churchill or he’ll have company.

That was all, no signature, nothing but the message and the threat. Carmel bit her lip.

“Tubal,” she called.

“Yes, Lady.”

“Who has been in the office—inside the railing?”

“Hain’t been a soul in this mornin’,” he said—“not that I seen.”