"Most of them are good fellows, and bright writers. If you knew under what conditions some of them work, you would take off your hat every time you met them."
"To save my hat?" queried the Colonel. "But whom do you consider the foremost editor of the coast?"
"There is no such person. Men with single thoughts and purposes, are, as a rule, the men who make marks in this world. For instance, just now, the single purpose of James G. Fair, is to make money through mining. Hence, he is a great miner, and he, now and then, I am told, manages to save a few dollars in the business. The dream of C. P. Huntington is to make money through railroads, so he builds roads, that he may collect more fares and freights, and he collects more fares and freights so that he may build more roads, and I believe, all in all, that he is the ablest, if not the coldest and most pitiless, railroad man in the world. The ruling thought of Andy Barlow is to be a fighter, and he can draw and shoot in the space of a lightning's flash. The dream of George Washington, he having no children, was to create and adopt a nation which should at once be strong and free, and the result is, his grave is a shrine. But, as the eight notes of the scale, in their combinations, fill the world with music—or with discords, so the work of an editor covers all the subjects on which men have ever thought, or ever will think, and the best that any one editor can do is to handle a few subjects well. Among our coast editors there is one with more marked characteristics, more flashes of genius, in certain directions, more contradictions and more pluck than any other one possesses.
"That one is Henry Mighels, of Carson. I mention him because I have been thinking of him all day, and because I fear that his work is finished. The last we heard of him, was, that he was disputing with the surgeons in San Francisco, they telling him that he was fatally ill, and he, offering to wager two to one that they were badly mistaken."
"Poor Henry," mused the Colonel; "he is a plucky man. I heard one of our rich men once try to get him to write something, or not to write something, I have forgotten which, and when Mighels declined to consent, the millionaire told him he was too poor to be so exceedingly independent. Here Mighels, in a low voice, which sounded to me like the purr of a tiger, said: 'You are quite mistaken, you do not know how rich I am. I have that little printing office at Carson; paper enough to last me for a week or ten days. I have a wife and three babies,' and then suddenly raising his voice, to the dangerous note, and bringing his fist down on the table before him with a crash, he shouted, 'and they are all mine!'
"The rich man looked at him, and, smiling, said: 'Don't talk like a fool, Mighels.' The old humor was all back in Mighels' face in an instant, as he replied, 'Was I talking like a fool, old man? What a sublime faculty I have of exactly gauging my conversation to the mental grasp of my listener!' But, Alex, do you not think there is a great deal of humbug about the much vaunted power of the press?"
"There's gratitude for you. You ask me such a question as that."
"And why not?" inquired the Colonel.
"You won a great suit last week, did you not—the case of Jones vs. Smith?"
"Yes. It was wonderful; let me tell you about it."