"I appreciate—I know," she began, "but I can't——"
"See here," I said severely. "You're in the newspaper business, aren't you?"
"Yes."
"Then I propose to subscribe for your paper. I demand my rights. And besides"—it came to me with sudden inspiration—"I must have, immediately, a thousand envelopes with my name printed in the corner."
With that I drew my pocketbook quickly from my pocket and handed her a bill. She took it doubtfully—but at that moment there was a tremendous bump on the porch, and the voice of Fergus shouting directions. When the two men came in with their burden I was studying a fire insurance advertisement on the wall, and Anthy was stepping confidently toward the door.
I wish I could picture the look on Fergus's face when Bucky presented his book and Anthy gave him a bill requiring change. Fergus stood rubbing one finger behind his ear—a sign that there were things in the universe that puzzled him.
While these thrilling events and hairbreadth escapes had been taking place, while the doomed Star was being saved to twinkle for another week, the all-unconscious Captain had been sitting at his desk rumbling and grumbling as he opened the exchanges. This was an occupation he affected greatly to despise, but which he would not have given over for the world. By the time he had read about a dozen of his esteemed contemporaries he was usually in a condition in which he could, as he himself put it, "wield a pungent pen." He had arrived at that nefarious sheet, the Sterling Democrat, and was leaning back in his chair reading the utterly preposterous lucubrations of Brother Kendrick, which he always saved to the last to give a final fillip to his spirits. Suddenly he dashed the paper aside, sat up straight, and cried out with tremendous vigour:
"Fudge!"
It was glorious; it came quite up to my highest expectations. But somehow, at that moment, it was enough for me to see and hear the Captain, without getting any better acquainted. I wasn't sure, indeed, that I cared to know him at all. I didn't like his new pipe—which shows how little I then understood the Captain!
As I was going out, for even the most interesting incidents must have an end, I stepped over and said to Anthy in a low voice: