“I got to borrow from the bank,” he said, finally. “No merchant kin git along without accommodation. Bank says I’m wastin’ too much money advertisin’, and it can’t back me if I keep on.”
“So you take orders from the bank?” she asked, hotly, out of her inexperience.
“You kin bet your bottom dollar I do,” he said.
Carmel bit her lip. “Abner Fownes is a stockholder in the bank, isn’t he?”
“One of the biggest.”
Carmel turned away and left the store. She had run down her fact. No more was necessary. She knew why merchants were canceling their contracts with her—it was because Abner Fownes issued orders to do so. For the first time he showed his hand in overt act. The question now was: How many merchants in Gibeon could Abner Fownes control? How long could he continue to dictate to them?... What good was circulation increase if advertising patronage failed?
She returned to the office in lowest spirits and considered her case. It was not pleasant consideration.
She had arrived in town a few weeks before, a stranger, without friends. She was unacquainted with Gibeon and with its peculiarities, and at the very beginning had made an enemy of its leading citizen, a man ostensibly possessed of great power to blight her prospects. She had made no friends, had not sought to strengthen her position by alliances. Frankly, she knew almost as little about Gibeon to-day as she knew the hour of her arrival. Her acquaintance was altogether with the melodramatic side of the town’s life, with the disappearance of its sheriff; with illicit dealings in liquor; with its political trickery. She did not know who were its solid, dependable, law-respecting citizens. It might have been well to go to the trouble of finding who of Gibeon’s residents were in sympathy with her campaign of disclosures, but she had not done so. She stood alone, without the approval of those who worked with her.
She saw how she had plunged into things with her habitual impulsiveness, without giving consideration to facts or consequences. Without intending it to be so, she had so arranged matters that the battle stood as the Free Press against the world. How much better it would have been to move cautiously; to be sure of her ground; to know she could rely upon powerful support. She wondered if it were too late....
At this stage in her reflections, George Bogardus, undertaker, darkened her door. George was not a youth, but he simulated youth. He wore the sort of clothes one sees in magazine illustrations—with exaggerations. He wore spats. A handkerchief with a colored border allowed its corner to peer from his breast pocket, and useless eyeglasses hung from a broad black ribbon. If George were seen standing in the window of some clothing store catering to the trade of those who dress by ear rather than by eye, he would have been perfection. Once George saw a play in Boston, and since that day he had impersonated a young English nobleman who had been its hero. His speech was a quaint mingling of New England intonation and idiom with what he could remember of the inflections and vocal mannerisms of Lord Algernon Pauncefote.