As far as possible, we sat twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays. We usually worked uninterruptedly for two hours, with no sound save that of my voice as I pronounced the letters and punctuation marks over which the pointer of the planchette paused in its swift race across the board. My husband discovered early in the work that if he permitted himself the luxury of a smile he was in danger of distracting Mrs. Hays, who always sat facing him, and thus of bringing about confusion in the record. Under Mark's specific instruction she has schooled herself to keep her mind as nearly blank as is possible for a woman who is absolutely conscious and normal, and the evidence that something humorous was being transmitted through her would be diverting, to say the least. As for my own part in the work, I seldom realized the import of the sentences I had spelled out, my whole attention being concentrated on the rapidly gliding pointer. When my husband read aloud the copy he had taken down it almost invariably came to Mrs. Hays and me as something entirely new.
The story of Jap Herron, as it stands completed, does not follow the original order of the first fifteen chapters. The early part of the tale was handled in a manner so sketchy and rapid in its action that three whole chapters and seven fragments of chapters were dictated and inserted after the work was finished. In the original copy the second chapter suffered little change up to the point of George Thomas's advent, with the suggestion that he might bring in some more turnips. Following the disaster to Judge Bowers's speech, Mark took a short cut to pave the way for the next chapter. It ran thus:
"But bad luck cannot camp on your trail forever. In the gladsome June-time, Ellis married Flossy Bowers, and her dowry of two thousand dollars and her following of kin set the Herald on its feet."
These two sentences were expanded into the more important half of the third chapter, almost five months after they had been dictated, and this without a rereading of the story. At another time, when this curious kind of revision was under way, Mark dictated the latter part of the second chapter, wherein Ellis Hinton tells Jap how he happened to be starving in Bloomtown. When he had finished the dictation, with the words, "My boy, that blue calico lady was Mrs. Kelly Jones," he continued:
"Emily will know where to fit it in."
This fitting in was not extremely difficult, since there was only one place in the story into which each of the inserted chapters or fragments could be made to fit; but the original copy had to be read several times before these thin places became apparent, and I got no help whatever from Mark. Once, when I implored him to tell me where a certain brief but gripping paragraph belonged, he replied, "Emily, that is your job. I don't want the Hannibal girl to fall down on it."
On that second Monday night in September, when the "office force" settled itself to serious work, my husband read to us the copy we had transmitted. The chapter ended with what is now the closing paragraph of the third chapter:
"The Herald put on a new dress, and the hell-box was dumped full of the discarded, mutilated types that had so long given strabismus to the patient readers of the Bloomtown Herald."
The diet of turnips and sorghum and the other humorous touches of the narrative overwhelmed us with laughter, whereat the planchette under our fingers wrote:
"Sounds like Mark, eh?"