“What a bore! Then we have to stand in a false light, eh? Damn it! I call all kinds of god to witness if this is just and right!”
“Let’s wait for two or three days and see how it turns out. And if we can’t do anything else, we will have to catch him at the hot springs town.”
“Leaving this fight affair a separate case?”
“Yes. We’ll have to his hit weak spot with our own weapon.”
“That may be good. I haven’t much to say in planning it out; I leave it to you and will do anything at your bidding.”
I parted from Porcupine then. If Red Shirt was really instrumental in bringing us two into the trouble as Porcupine supposed, he certainly deserves to be called down. Red Shirt outranks us in brainy work. And there is no other course open but to appeal to physical force. No wonder we never see the end of war in the world. Among individuals, it is, after all, the question of superiority of the fist.
Next day I impatiently glanced over the paper, the arrival of which I had been waiting with eagerness, but not a correction of the news or even a line of retraction could be found. I pressed the matter on Badger when I went to the school, and he said it might probably appear tomorrow. On that “tomorrow” a line of retraction was printed in tiny types. But the paper did not make any correction of the story. I called the attention of Badger to the fact, and he replied that that was about all that could be done under the circumstance. The principal, with the face like a badger and always swaggering, is surprisingly, wanting in influence. He has not even as much power as to bring down a country newspaper, which had printed a false story. I was so thoroughly indignant that I declared I would go alone to the office and see the editor-in-chief on the subject, but Badger said no.
“If you go there and have a blowup with the editor,” he continued, “it would only mean of your being handed out worse stuff in the paper again. Whatever is published in a paper, right or wrong, nothing can be done with it.” And he wound up with a remark that sounded like a piece of sermon by a Buddhist bonze that “We must be contented by speedily despatching the matter from our minds and forgetting it.”
If newspapers are of that character, it would be beneficial for us all to have them suspended,—the sooner the better. The similarity of the unpleasant sensation of being written-up in a paper and being bitten-down by a turtle became plain for the first time by the explanation of Badger.
About three days afterward, Porcupine came to me excited, and said that the time has now come, that he proposes to execute that thing we had planned out. Then I will do so, I said, and readily agreed to join him. But Porcupine jerked his head, saying that I had better not. I asked him why, and he asked if I had been requested by the principal to tender my resignation. No, I said, and asked if he had. He told me that he was called by the principal who was very, very sorry for him but under the circumstance requested him to decide to resign.