“Anyhow, I’m going to do it—and you’ll see. A regular voting. Coupons and everything. We’ll have a six months’ subscription worth fifty votes, a year’s subscription worth a hundred votes.”
“But—er—who will they vote for?”
“Just wait,” she said.
Following which she proceeded with enthusiasm. First she printed the rules of the contest in the Free Press, and then she went to Tubal.
“I want to stick things up all over the township,” she said, “telling about it.”
“We got a mess of yaller stock,” he said. “You write it out and I’ll print it, and we’ll make the Prof. go and paste ’em up.”
So it was done, and on a day Gibeon awoke to find itself placarded with large yellow notices making it know that the Free Press was in a fever to discover who was considered the handsomest man in town, and to read the paper for particulars. Carmel was right—it caused talk....
In other matters she was feeling her way, and the way was not plain to her. Of petty news there was aplenty, and this she printed. She also printed a trifling item about a traveling salesman who had been “making” the territory for years in a buggy, and who had been detected in the act of smuggling a few bottles of liquor over the border in his sample case, thus adding to a meager income.
“There’s your vast liquor traffic,” she said to Evan Pell, “a poor, fat little drummer with six bottles of whisky.”
“Um!... Who arrested him?”