“Surely,” said Blair, speaking with a kind of eagerness natural to him, and which ran red-hot throughout all he did; “surely, the president must make no personal interference. Were he to order printing out of one paper and into another, the opposite side would use it for a club against him to the last day of his career.”
“But there is a way,” said Noah. “We may have advantage of the mean fears of our folk of place who are ever prompt to read a threat against themselves. Such egotists do they grow to be that, following a decade of office holding, it may not so much as thunder but your agitated desk-man knows it at once for some plot of heaven's hand to snatch him from his pap.”
“How would you approach these fears with an appeal?” I asked.
“And there could be nothing easier,” quoth Noah, “while missing every word that might look like an order from the White House. You have but to issue a request, addressed to each who is in control of any least of printing, to send to the president with every month a full report of what advertisements he has dispensed and to what imprints. There you have it in your claw; after such notice not one line will go to Duff, but all to Blair. With the one stone you kill two birds; the Telegraph is destroyed while the Globe in its fortunes is made beyond a chance.”
“Your mighty proper suggestion will be adopted,” said I. “The request you speak of goes forth this very day.”
When Blair had departed the scene to look after the daily fortunes of his paper, Noah and I, as was much and frequently our case, settled to a mouthful of party gossip. We had not run far, however, when my Jim appeared with a word from the General to meet him in his personal workshop on some trivial concern.
“D'Marse Gen'ral trees Jim by d'winder,” said that worthy black man, “an' tells him to ask you-all, Marse Major, to come squanderin' along down to his room. He allows, d'Marse Gen'ral does, how he's got letters from home you might like to see.”
“And how is your 'Marse Gen'ral'?” said Noah, for “the red-head Jew gentleman,” as Jim ever referred to him, was fond of making Jim talk. “How does your 'Marse Gen'ral' carry himself these winter days?”
“Mighty toler'ble an' tranquil, thankee, sah!” replied Jim; “mighty toler'ble an' tranquil. Jim on'y wishes he himse'f was feelin' half so good. But Jim's got a mis'ry in his back, an' d'rheumatics in his laigs an' shoulders ontwell he can't but jes' make out to hobble 'round. Yassir; them rheumatics leaves Jim like a fly in a saucer of m'lasses; he gets about plumb slow.”
Jim furnished a most doleful air to be the frame for this piece of news; one might have thought him some flame-enveloped martyr.