“What of it?” retorted Jack, indignantly; “d’you think I’d throw down a subscriber?” Then, as he reached for his cap: “I reckon I’d better go over to the Alhambra an’ see how hard old Kell got plugged. It ought to be good for a column. Say!” and Jack beamed on Higginson Peabody, “if he’d only beefed old Kell, wouldn’t it have been hot stuff?”
Higginson Peabody, when he graduated from Harvard, had been invited into the counting-room of his father’s State Street bank. But the old migratory instinct of his puritan ancestry was rife within him, and he hungered to go abroad into the land. The expanding West invited him; also, he distasted a bank and liked the notion of a paper.
“Well,” said the elder Peabody, “I don’t blame you. Massachusetts and Boston aren’t what they were. New England to-day is out in Kansas and Nebraska.”
Higginson Peabody resolved to start a paper. Dodge occurred to him; a friend returning had told him that newsy things were prone to happen in Dodge. The soil, by the friend’s word, was kindly; Higginson Peabody thought it would nourish and upbuild a paper. Wherefore, one bright autumnal morning, he dropped off at Dodge. Going over to the hotel he took a room by the month and confided to Mr. Wright that he would found the Weekly Planet.
Mr. Wright squeezed the hand of Higginson Peabody until it hung limp as a rag.
“It was an inspiration when you decided to come to Dodge,” said Mr. Wright.
“Do you think,” asked Higginson Peabody, painfully separating each finger from its fellows, “do you think your city ready for the birth of a great paper?”
“Ready? Dodge’ll sit up nights to rock its cradle and warm its milk!” quoth Mr. Wright.
Mr. Wright went down to the Long Branch and told Mr. Short. As information radiated from the Long Branch the extremest corner of Dodge was filled with the news in an hour.
When Mr. Wright withdrew to the Long Branch he left Higginson Peabody sitting on the hotel porch. The costume of Higginson Peabody culminated in a silk hat that would have looked well on Boston Common. The tall, shiny hat excited the primitive interest of Cimarron Bill, who lightly shot it from the head of its owner. Then, with bullet following bullet, he rolled it along the sidewalk. Several gentlemen joined Cimarron Bill in this sprightly pastime of the hat. Full twenty took part, and Higginson Peabody’s headgear, to quote Cimarron Bill as he reported the episode later to Mr. Masterson, was: