Mark winked at me.
“See what you’ve made of this p-p-paper already,” says he. “L-look what you kin do before you’re through. D’you know how f-folks in this town speak about you, Mr. Spat? D’you know you’ve been spoke of for the State Legislature? And you’d go away and desert Wicksville and us on account of a few wimmin that couldn’t hurt a-a-anythin’.”
“Mark Tidd,” says Spat, “it seems like I’m duty bound to stay, but mark my words, which is words of experience, paid for with groans and misery, you’re goin’ to wish you was locked into a cage with ravenin’ wildcats and howlin’ hyenas before this contest is over. I’ll stay, but I’ll suffer. I’ll stay to save you boys from the results of your rashness.... Now gimme back that challenge.”
He went back to work and set it up, and more stuff Mark had written explaining all about the contest, and Mrs. Strubber’s picture was to be printed right in the middle of all of it, with some glowing and complimentary facts about her and her club. The whole thing was to be printed on the first page of the Trumpet.
While this was going on Mark and the rest of us was pretty busy getting all the news of the county fair that was going on, and the night before the Trumpet came out we had a heap of writing to do. It was my job to write little items about folks and things that happened. Mark said he wanted enough to fill a column, so I set to work, and it was work, I can tell you. I did more chawing of my pencil than writing, and it took me about a dozen times as long to do it as it took Mark to write three times as much. But I was pretty proud of what I’d done when I was through with it. I figgered it would be about the most interesting part of the paper, and it did come pretty close to being that. When I handed it to Mark I says, “There, if that hain’t perty good newspaper writin’ I hope I don’t ever git to eat another fried-cake.”
Mark read it over, and every once in a while he would look up at me and chuckle, and then he says, “Binney, if you’d done this apurpose it would be g-great.”
“I done it apurpose,” says I. “Think I done all that writin’ by accident, like a feller would stub his toe and accidentally skin his nose?”
“Um!” says he. “We’ll p-p-print it jest as it stands, and say, ‘By Binney Jenks,’ at the top, so everybody’ll know you d-did it. That,” says he, “may save the l-lives of some of the rest of us.”
“What you mean?” says I.
“I’ll r-read ’em to you,” says he. This was the first he read: