“Let’s see,” says Mark, “how much we m-might make a year out of this paper if this contest b-brought our subscription list up to f-fifteen hunderd. The subscriptions would amount to eighteen hunderd and seventy-f-five dollars. Then our regular advertisin’ that we could f-figger on here in Wicksville and the county’ll fetch about seventy-five dollars a week, or even up to a hunderd, if we’re real lucky. As soon as we git enough s-subscribers I’m goin’ after some out-of-town adver-tisin’. I see a lot of it in good country p-papers. We’ll git some of that, and our job work amounts to quite a bit the way it’s been comin’ in. Looks to me like we ought to make this p-paper show a profit of, anyhow, two thousand d-dollars a year, and maybe more.”
“Countin’ chickens before they’re hatched,” says I.
“We’re hatchin’ ’em fast,” says he.
“Spragg may bust up the nest,” says I, “and drive off the settin’ hen.”
“Spragg hain’t got real d-dangerous yet” says he, “but we’ll have to pay him some attention perty quick.”
“Seems like we ought to get somethin’ more to do to take up our time,” says I. “We hain’t busy enough. Nothin’ to do but run a contest that’s close to bein’ a civil war, and git adver-tisin’ and write the news and git the news, and scare up advertisements, and tend to Spragg, and monkey around with Rock’s mix-up. If, maybe, we could buy a three-ring circus and be all the acts, includin’ the menagerie, and then have school start up to give us somethin’ to do daytimes, I guess we’d keep from gettin’ lonesome.”
Mark grinned, and says he was going to get somebody to help Tecumseh Androcles in the shop, but how that helped us I didn’t see.
Well, as I was saying, those women combed the town and country for subscriptions, until it got so that anybody who hadn’t subscribed for the Trumpet was as popular as a little girl coming to school with a box of candy. All you had to do was to stand in front of the post-office and mention that you hadn’t subscribed for the paper yet, and right off you’d be asked by one woman to go driving with her, and by another to come to dinner, and by another if you wouldn’t like a batch of her raised biscuits. I dunno what a feller could have got out of not having subscribed yet if he held out long enough, but I guess most of ’em got their money’s worth. For when you get a paper for a year, and two or three invitations to dinner, and buggy rides, and auto rides, and fresh pies sent over, and all that sort of thing, why, it would be a mean man that wasn’t satisfied.
Mark sat down at his desk and started writing letters. I guess he wrote a dozen and put them in the envelopes and stamped them.
“Who’s goin’ to git all the mail?” I says.