“When I need a danger signal,” observed the old lady with her most positive air, “I’ll wave any kind of rag. The ‘Star’ has circulation.”
“Yes,” admitted the Health Master, “and among the very class we want to reach. But what’s the use?”
“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Sharpless. “But I’m going to find out.”
One hour later she walked into the editorial sanctum of Mr. “Bart” Snyder, editor, proprietor, and controlling mind of as “yellow” a sheet as ever subsisted on a combination of enterprise, real journalistic ability, and blackmail. Mr. Snyder sat in a perfect slump of apparent languor, his body sagging back into his tilted chair, one foot across his desk, the other trailing like a broken wing along the floor, his shrewd, lined face uplifted at an acute angle with the cigar he was chewing, and his green hat achieving the most rakish effect possible to a third slant. His brilliant gray eyes were narrowed into a hard twinkle as he surveyed his visitor.
“Siddown,” he grunted, and shoved a chair toward her with the grounded foot.
Grandma Sharpless did not “siddown.” Instead she marched over to a spot directly in front of him, halted, and looked straight into the hard, humorous face.
“Bartholomew Snyder,” said she crisply, “I knew you when you were a boy. I knew your mother, too. She was a decent woman. Take off that hat.”
The Snyder jaw fell so unpremeditatedly that the Snyder cigar dropped upon the littered floor. One third of a second later, the Snyder foot descended upon it (and it was a twenty-cent cigar, too) as the Snyder chair reverted to the perpendicular, and the Snyder hat came off. The Snyder countenance quivered into articulation and therefrom came a stunned, “Well, I’ll be—”
“No, you don’t! Not in my presence,” cut in his visitor. “Now, you listen.”
“I’m listening,” he assured her in a strangled murmur.