“Very likely. Meantime he’s smashed our transfer scheme. Or he will smash it when the time comes.”
“I shall go ahead with it just the same.”
“You’ll be swamped. He’s dug up some tax assessment material on us that would n’t look pretty in print if he sprung it now. We’ll have to go slow.”
The President of the P.-U. swallowed his desire for immediate reprisals. He felt that his prey was sure in the long run. No newspaper could offend consistently the important people and interests of a community as The Guardian was doing, and continue to make a living. That way bankruptcy lay!
Personally, Montrose Clark declared against this young upstart a war of extermination. He would eliminate the noxious creature. He would make the town too hot for him.
Vast would have been his rage could he have known that, at the same time, the editor was meditating much the same design concerning himself. War to the finish, on both sides. And all, in the first instance, because of a minor affectation expressed in the pronunciation of the hybrid word “rippawtah.” Of such petty stuff are human complications constructed, and thereby the plans of the mighty brought to dust!
CHAPTER V
POLITICS as such had never greatly interested Jeremy Robson. The trivial and blatant insincerities of party platforms offended a mind naturally direct and sincere. As he saw the game played at the Capitol, it seemed to consist mainly in clumsy finesse directed to unprofitable ends, on the part of the lawmakers, back of whom sat the little tin gods of finance and commerce, as players sit back of the pieces on a chessboard. Only, it dawned upon Jeremy, in this game it was the public that paid the stakes; the public which Jeremy intended that The Guardian should represent. His platform was “Fair play all around and a chance for all.”