"We'll give this flare."
The news man put heavy underscores in blue beneath the words TEN
THOUSAND DOLLARS REWARD, BY THE VALLEY CATTLE ASSOCIATION FOR PROOF OF
THE PERPETRATORS OF LAST NIGHT'S VILE CRIME.
"We'll put this in red! God! The Senator is an artist! I like having to lick the hand that leashes me."
"And feeds you, eh?" added Bat.
Beneath the flare heading followed a statement of facts (more or less) to the effect that in an altercation between the drovers of some outside cattlemen and the herders belonging to the MacDonald ranch, the sheep herd had been hustled—("I like your alliterations, Bat, it gives flavor of quality," commented the news-man with a snap of his black eyes,) too close to the edge of the Rim Rocks with the unintended and tragical result that several hundred sheep had been shoved over the battlements. ("What I like specially is what you don't give," commented the news-man.)
There was not a word about broken backs and slashed lambs and disemboweled ewes; nor of what had been found on the Upper Mesas. As a sort of addendum it was stated that a boy belonging to the Mission school had lost his life in the melee.
"Anyway, we're in style! Way to tell a thing now adays is to turn all around it, and not tell anything at all. Auto suggestion, eh, Bat?"
Bat's fat cheeks blew up in the explosion of a bursting paper bag. "You bet it's auto all right. If you'd heard the old man talking all the way down on the iniquity of the thing: he kept it going harder than the buzz wagon."
"Better inform a breathlessly eager public that he's gone to
Washington?"
"Here, I've got that, too! He dictated that straight, 'for the express purpose of taking up the whole question of eliminating the grazing areas from the National Forests when it will be possible for the State authorities to protect the live stock interests,'" Bat handed across the second item.