“Leave go me! What 'all that'?”
“All that tea and chicken and salad and wafers—all kinds of things; sardines, for all I know!”
“They come in Briscoes' buckboard while you was gone. Briscoes sent 'em in a basket; I took 'em up and she set the basket under the table. You'd seen it if you'd 'a' looked. Quit that!” And it was unjust to cuff the perfectly innocent and mystified Bud, and worse not to tell him what the punishment was for.
Before the day was over, system had been introduced, and the “Herald” was running on it: and all that warm, rainy afternoon, the editor and Fisbee worked in the editorial rooms, Parker and Bud and Mr. Schofield (after his return with the items and a courteous message from Ephraim Watts) bent over the forms downstairs, and Uncle Xenophon was cleaning the store-room and scrubbing the floor.
An extraordinary number of errands took the various members of the printing force up to see the editor-in-chief, literally to see the editor-in-chief; it was hard to believe that the presence had not flown—hard to keep believing, without the repeated testimony of sight, that the dingy room upstairs was actually the setting for their jewel; and a jewel they swore she was. The printers came down chuckling and gurgling after each interview; it was partly the thought that she belonged to the “Herald,” their paper. Once Ross, as he cut down one of the temporarily distended advertisements, looked up and caught the foreman giggling to himself.
“What in the name of common-sense you laughin' at, Cale?” he asked.
“What are you laughing at?” rejoined the other.
“I dunno!”
The day wore on, wet and dreary outside, but all within the “Herald's” bosom was snug and busy and murmurous with the healthy thrum of life and prosperity renewed. Toward six o'clock, system accomplished, the new guiding-spirit was deliberating on a policy as Harkless would conceive a policy, were he there, when Minnie Briscoe ran joyously up the stairs, plunged into the room, waterproofed and radiant, and caught her friend in her eager arms, and put an end to policy for that day.
But policy and labor did not end at twilight every day; there were evenings, as in the time of Harkless, when lamps shone from the upper windows of the “Herald” building. For the little editor worked hard, and sometimes she worked late; she always worked early. She made some mistakes at first, and one or two blunders which she took more seriously than any one else did. But she found a remedy for all such results of her inexperience, and she developed experience. She set at her task with the energy of her youthfulness and no limit to her ambition, and she felt that Harkless had prepared the way for a wide expansion of the paper's interests; wider than he knew. She had a belief that there were possibilities for a country newspaper, and she brought a fresh point of view to operate in a situation where Harkless had fallen, perhaps, too much in the rut; and she watched every chance with a keen eye and looked ahead of her with clear foresight. What she waited and yearned for and dreaded, was the time when a copy of the new “Herald” should be placed in the trembling hands of the man who lay in the Rouen hospital. Then, she felt, if he, unaware of her identity, should place everything in her hands unreservedly, that would be a tribute to her work—and how hard she would labor to deserve it! After a time, she began to realize that, as his representative and the editor of the “Herald,” she had become a factor in district politics. It took her breath—but with a gasp of delight, for there was something she wanted to do.