Therefore she pounced upon the records of the concern and very quickly discovered that Old Man Nupley had left her no placer mine out of which she could wash a pan of gold before breakfast. She had, she found, become the owner of the right to pay off a number of pressing debts. The plant was mortgaged. It owed for paper; there were installments due on the job press; there were bills for this, that, and the other thing which amounted to a staggering total....
She was not daunted, however, until she examined the credit side of the affair. The year had brought the Free Press a grand total of five hundred and sixty-one paid subscriptions; the advertising, at the absurd rate of fifteen cents an inch, had been what politicians call scattering; and the job work had hardly paid for the trouble of keeping the dust off the press. The paper was dead on its feet, as so many rural weeklies are. She could not help thinking that her uncle Nupley had died in the nick of time to avoid bankruptcy.
It is worth recording that Carmel did not weep a tear of disappointment, nor feel an impulse to walk out of the place and go the thousand miles back to Michigan to take the job of teaching English in the home high school. No. The only emotion Carmel felt was anger. Her eyes actually glinted, and a red spot made its appearance upon each cheek. She had arrived in Gibeon with a glowing illusion packed in her trunk; unkind fact had snatched it away and replaced it with clammy reality.
She got up from her desk and walked into the shop, where Tubal was pretending to be busy.
“Gibeon is the county seat, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Yes ’m.”
“How many people live here?”
“We claim two thousand. Ol’ Man Nupley allowed the’ was four thousand in the township.”
“Then” (her manner put Tubal in the wrong at once and compelled him to fumble about for a defense) “why have we only a little more than five hundred subscribers?”
“Wa-al, one thing or another, seems as though. Folks never took to this paper much.... Mostly they take in the Standard from over to Litchfield.”