Tubal recalled the mental anguish which went into the composition of these and columns of other similar items, and solemnly renounced forever the dignities of editorship.
“No,” he said, waggling his head gravely, “I calc’late Ol’ Man Nupley done us a favor by leavin’ this sheet to somebody else.”
“She’ll be comin’ on the noon train,” said Simmy. “That’s when I quit.”
“I s’pose,” Tubal said, as he cocked his eye at a cockroach scurrying across the floor, “she’ll favor Ol’ Man Nupley in looks. Seems like that’s a cross heavier ’n any woman ought to bear.” He estimated the rate of progress of the roach, and, as it were, brought down his bird with a supremely skillfully aimed deluge of the juice of the weed. “If wimmin is goin’ to insist on keepin’ on bein’ wimmin, they ought to see to it you kin look at ’em without sufferin’.”
“Mebby she’s jest comin’ up to sell out,” said Simmy, hopefully.
“Sell? Sell this here rag?... Say!”
“Why not, I’d like to know?”
“Because,” said Tubal, “it owes about two hundred dollars more’n it’s wuth ... and, now we lost the county advertisin’, it’ll owe a dum sight more.”
He walked to the door which gave from the front of the shop to the business and editorial office of the paper, and there he stood as if upon some vantage point, surveying all that existed of the Gibeon Free Press. What he saw was not especially inviting; nowhere was an indication of that romance which is believed to lurk about the business of disseminating news. The shop wore the haphazard look of a junk yard, contented to recline and snore in dust and frowziness. The room wore the air of a place where nothing ever happens and where nothing is apt to happen.... Just inside the door squatted the antiquated, limping cylinder press which gave birth weekly to the Free Press, and which gave off with sullen brazenness the look of overmuch child-bearing. It knew it was going to break down in the middle of every run, and it had been cursed at so often and so fluently that it was utterly indifferent. It was a press without ambition. Of late years it had gotten into a frame of mind where it didn’t care a hang whether it printed a paper or not—which is an alarming state of mind for a printing press to be in.... Over to the right were shelves of stock, ill sorted, dusty, dog eared at the corners where Tubal had rubbed his shoulder against them in passing. Thin stacks of red and blue board, upon which tickets for the Methodist lawn sociable or the Baptist chicken dinner might be painted, lopped with discouraged limpness over the edge of the shelving and said improper and insulting things to the slatternly press. A couple of stones elbowed each other and a case of type a little further back, and a comparatively new (and unpaid-for) job press, whose paint still existed even to shininess in spots, rather stuck up its nose at the rest of the company and felt itself altogether too good for such society. There was also a theoretical spittoon—theoretical because it was the one spot in the room safe from Tubal’s unerring jets of tobacco juice. These were the high spots arising from a jumble of rubbish which it was easier to kick about from place to place than to remove altogether.... Tubal waggled his head.
He turned to survey the business and editorial office, and found nothing there to uplift his soul. There was a grimy railing of matched lumber, inside which a table staggered under an accumulation of exchanges and catalogues and old cuts brought in to pass the evening of their lives as paper weights. An old black-walnut desk with a bookcase in its second story tried to maintain a faded dignity beside an old safe from which the combination knob had been removed for fear somebody would shut and lock it, as once happened, with disastrous results. On the wall hung a group picture of the state legislature of 1882. One could have bedded down a cow very comfortably in the waste paper on the floor.