“Spragg says so,” I told him.
“Hum!” says he. “I sort of d-doubt it. Spragg don’t look like he had money enough or gumption enough.”
“Maybe somebody’s backin’ him,” says I.
“Might be,” says he. “Guess I b-b-better look into it.”
So he and I went out together, leaving Plunk and Tallow to mind the office.
“A d-daily,” says he, “would have hard sleddin’ here. Don’t b’lieve it would make a go. But while Spragg was t-tryin’ it he might hurt us a lot. Two newspapers in a little town l-like this can’t m-make money.”
“Neither can one,” says I. “Anyhow we hain’t got rich. Might as well be two as one, so far’s I can see.”
“The Trumpet’s goin’ to pay,” says he, and he shut his jaw tight, like he does when he’s made up his mind to do something or bust. “Spragg or no Spragg, we’re goin’ to make a reg’lar paper of the Trumpet—and git money out of it. Don’t go gittin’ limp in the s-s-spine,” he says.
It don’t take long in Wicksville to find out what’s going on, because there isn’t much going on, anyhow, and as soon as something turns up and one man hears of it, why, he can’t rest or eat till he’s run all over peddling it to everybody he sees. And every man he tells has to start out the same way, so in a half-hour from the time a thing starts almost everybody in town is out looking for somebody to tell it to. That’s what makes it so hard to run a newspaper. Everybody knows everything he reads in the paper as soon as the editor does. I guess about the only reason folks subscribe to the Trumpet at all is to see if their own name is mentioned, or to say to somebody else: “Huh! There hain’t never no news in this paper. I knew every doggone thing printed in it two days before the paper come out.”
Well, that’s why it wasn’t hard for us to find out that Spragg really was planning to start a daily paper in town, nor to figger out that he didn’t have much money to start it with himself. He was trying to start what he called a co-operative paper. Co-operative means that one man gets a lot of other men to put their money into a thing with the idea that they’ll all get some good out of it, whereas nobody gets anything but the fellow that starts it.