Jap Herron Part 12

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, j.a.p 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 j.a.p'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 c.r.a.pe. 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 hea.r.s.e 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 j.a.p looked for a long, anguished moment upon the flower-ma.s.sed 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 a.s.sembled 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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, j.a.p. 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. j.a.p 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 s.p.a.ce and visualized the rebuilding of Bloomtown.

Perhaps Flossy sensed the fact that these evenings were bone and sinew to j.a.p'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 demiG.o.d 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 j.a.p, sticking away at the last legislative report.

"n.o.body 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 j.a.p, climbing down interestedly.

The a.s.sociate 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 cla.s.s, and after this election the ante 'd be five bones."

"Well," conceded j.a.p, "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!" j.a.p exploded. "What can we say about him?"

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

"I never tried fiction," j.a.p averred, "but for the honor of the first aspirant to the office of Mayor of Bloomtown, and the greater glory of our a.s.sociate Editor, I am going to plunge."

And plunge he did. When the town read the eulogium that j.a.p 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.

n.o.body 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 n.o.blest Roman of them all." For which Bill accounted to j.a.p 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," a.s.sured 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 j.a.p 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 j.a.p judicially.

The Mayor-elect decided to let it alone; but j.a.p 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.