With this, as the lad threw the burning roll into a barrel of waste paper—which he presently extinguished with a bucket of water—Braine took the over-proofs from their hook, and passed on into the back room, which served as the editorial office of the Thebes Daily Enterprise.
The four men sitting there presented but one bodily presence. They were: the Local Editor, the River Editor, the Society Editor, and "Our Reporter," and their name was Moses Harbell, or, if universal usage is authority in nomenclature, "Mose" Harbell.
Mose was a bushy-haired man of fifty, who had been Local Editor, River Editor, Society Editor, and "Our Reporter" on the newspapers of small river towns from a time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary.
He had never once dared aspire to a more independent position as his own master. Perhaps the fact that he had imprudently married early, and now had a family consisting of a mother, a mother-in-law, an imbecile sister, a shrewish wife, nine children in various stages of progress toward grown-up-hood, and four dogs of no recognized breed, had dampened the ardor of his ambition, and inclined him to the conservative view that to draw a salary from somebody else, even though it be not a munificent one, is on the whole safer for a prudent family man, than to take ambitious risks on his own account.
Mose was known all up and down the river by his first name in its abbreviated form, and by no other on any occasion. He was never spoken of in print without the adjective prefix "genial," and he never omitted to call anybody "genial" whom he had occasion to mention in his own paragraphs, from the morose curmudgeon who invited everybody in town to his parties except Mose himself, to the most ill-natured mud clerk who stood in the rain on the levee at midnight to check freight received by the steamboat that employed him in that capacity, at nothing a month and his board.
Life had dealt rather hardly with Mose, but it had not succeeded in curdling any of the milk of human kindness mingled with his blood.
His notion of newspaper editing, apart from calling everybody "genial," was to mention everybody on every possible occasion, to praise everybody without regard to the possibility or impossibility of the occasion, and to chronicle the personal happenings of the town after the following fashion:
"Ned Heffron, the genial ticket dispenser of the Central Railroad, borrowed a boiled shirt yesterday, got his boots blacked on tick, and started on a free pass to Johnsonboro, there to wed the acknowledged belle of that young and thriving city, Miss Blankety Blank, who will henceforth be a chief ornament to the society of Thebes."
Mose was a thorn in the flesh of his young chief, who was a very earnest person, possessed of a conviction that a newspaper owes some sort of duty to the public, and that its province is to discriminate somewhat in the bestowal of praise and blame. But Mose was necessary to the Thebes Daily Enterprise. Braine could not afford to dispense with his "geniality" as a part of the newspaper's equipment; for Mose knew everybody within the Daily Enterprise's bailiwick and everybody knew Mose. Everybody made haste to tell Mose all the news there might be; and, although there was not much of importance in what he gathered, still it was news, and the news seemed to Braine a necessary part of a newspaper. Thus it happened that Mose went on calling everybody "genial" in the news department, even when his chief was excoriating the same persons in the editorial columns for conduct wholly inconsistent with Mose's imputation of unbounded geniality.
On this particular morning, however,—the morning of Edgar Braine's suicide—even Mose's presence, recalling, as it always did, his exasperating methods, could not ruffle the young man's exultant spirits. He was so exuberantly happy that he omitted to remonstrate with Mose about anything, and that tireless manufacturer of praise, observing the omission, immediately wrote and sent to the composing-room an elephantinely playful paragraph in which he said: