“It’s just a piece down the street,” directed the agent. “Go past the old town pump, and the livery stable. A red brick building. Best one in town. You can’t miss it.”
Penny and Louise took their bags and crossed to the shady side of the street. A horse and carriage had been tied to a hitching post and by contrast an expensive, new automobile was parked beside it. The unpaved road was thick with dust; the broken sidewalk was coated with it, as were the little plots of struggling grass.
In the entire town few persons were abroad. An old lady in a sunbonnet busily loaded boxes of groceries into a farm wagon. The only other sign of activity was at the livery stable where a group of men slouched on the street benches.
“Must we pass there?” Louise murmured. “Those men are staring as if they never saw a girl before.”
“Let them,” said Penny, undisturbed.
Two doors beyond the livery stable stood a newly built red brick building. In gold paint on the expanse of unwashed plate glass window were the words: “Hobostein Weekly.”
With heads high the girls ran the gantlet of loungers and reached the newspaper office. Through the plate glass they glimpsed a large, cluttered room where desks, bins of type, table forms and a massive flat-bed press all seemed jammed together. A rotund man they took to be the editor was talking to a customer in a loud voice. Neither took the slightest notice of the girls as they pushed open the door.
“I don’t care who you are or how much money you have,” the editor was saying heatedly. “I run my paper as I please—see! If you don’t like my editorials you don’t have to read them.”
“You’re a pin-headed, stubborn Dutchman!” the other man retorted. “It makes no difference to me what you run in your stupid old weekly, providing you don’t deliberately try to stir up the people of this valley.”
“Worrying about your pocketbook?”