“It’s suicide!” he declared.
“Then we’ll commit suicide,” said Bobby pleasantly.
Mr. Jolter, after long, grinning thought, solemnly shook hands with him.
“I’m for it,” said he. “Here’s hoping that we survive long enough to write our own obituary!”
Mr. Jolter, to whom fighting was as the breath of new-mown hay, and who had long been curbed in that delightful occupation, went back into his own office with a more cheerful air than he had worn for many a day, and issued a few forceful orders, winding up with a direction to the press foreman to prepare for ten thousand extra copies that evening.
When the three o’clock edition of the Bulletin came on the street, the entire first page was taken up by a life-size half-tone portrait of Sam Stone, and underneath it was the simple legend:
THIS MAN MUST LEAVE TOWN
The first citizens to awake to the fact that the Bulletin was born anew were the newsboys. Those live and enterprising merchants, with a very keen judgment of comparative values, had long since ceased to call the Bulletin at all; half of them had even ceased to carry it. Within two minutes after this edition was out they were clamoring for additional copies, and for the first time in years the alley door of the Bulletin was besieged by a seething mob of ragged, diminutive, howling masculinity. Out on the street, however, they were not even now calling the name of the paper. They were holding forth that black first page and screaming just the name of Sam Stone.
Sam Stone! It was a magic name, for Stone had been the boss of the town since years without number; a man who had never held office, but who dictated the filling of all offices; a man who was not ostensibly in any business, but who swayed the fortune of every public enterprise; a self-confessed grafter whom crusade after crusade had failed to dislodge from absolute power. The crowds upon the street snapped eagerly at that huge portrait and searched as eagerly through the paper for more about the Boss. They did not find it, except upon the editorial page, where, in the space usually devoted to drivel about “How Kind We Should Be to Dumb Animals,” and “Why Fathers Should Confide More in Their Sons,” appeared in black type a paraphrase of the legend on the outside: “Sam Stone Must Leave Town.” Beneath was the additional information: “Further issues of the Bulletin will tell why.” Above and below this was nothing but startlingly white blank paper, two solid columns of it up and down the page.
Down in the deep basement of the Bulletin, the big three-deck presses, two of which had been standing idle since the last presidential election, were pounding out copies by the thousand, while grimy pressmen, blackened with ink, perspired most happily.