"Can you shoot?" he asked, as seriously concerned as if the fate of editors in Ascalon darkened over her already.
"Everybody in this town can shoot," she sighed. "It's every boy's ambition to own and carry a pistol, and most of them do."
"I hope you'll never have to defend the independence of the press with arms," he said, making a small pleasantry of it. "More than likely they're gentlemen enough to let you say whatever you want to, and make no kick."
"The Headlight is going to be an awful joke with Riley Caldwell and me getting it out. But I'm not going to try to please anybody. That way I may please them all."
"It sounds like the sensible way. Have you edited before?"
"I used to help Mr. Smith, the editor they killed. That was in the summer vacation, just. I taught school the rest of the time."
"You must have been the busiest person in town," he said, with pride in her activities as if they had touched his own life long ago.
"I'm a poor stick of an editor, I'm afraid, though—I seem to be all mussed up with legal notices and this sudden flood of news. And I can't set type worth a cent!"
"Just let the news go," he suggested, not without concern for the part he might bear in her chronicle of late events in Ascalon.
"Let the news go!" She censured him with her softly chiding eyes. "I wish I could write like Mr. Smith—I'd wake this town up! Poor man, his coat is hanging in the office by the desk, so suggestive of him it makes me cry. I haven't had the heart to take it away—it would seem like expelling his spirit from the place. He was a slender, gentle little man, more like a minister than an editor. It took an awful coward to shoot him down that way."