"Whoopee!" yelled Bill, jumping from his stool and turning a handspring across the office.
"Reckon I'd better ask Flossy to fix my things—get my clothes out?" asked Jap, beaming radiantly over the big barrel stove. He started toward the door.
"Stop!" said Ellis, in a voice Jap had never heard. "You are not going."
"Not going?" echoed both boys hollowly.
"No!" almost shouted Ellis, his brown eyes flashing. "I might have expected this from that wooden-headed son of a lost art. Do you think that you are going to leave my office to lick the boots of that loafing gang of pie-biters? Not in a thousand years! I am going to put a tuck in that idea right now. And while I'm talking about it, you may as well know that Flossy is getting ready to teach you how to 'read and write and 'rithmetic,' as Bill says. And as for you, Bill, Flossy says that if your father hasn't enough pride to do the right thing by you, she'll give you an education, along with Jap. You begin your lessons to-morrow evening.
"Jap, write to that reformed auctioneer and thank him for his favor. Tell him that you belong to the ancient and honorable order of printers. When he runs for governor, you will boom him. Till then, nothing doing in the 'Halls of Justice.'"
Jap sulked all day, but he wrote the letter whose contents might have changed his career, and the following evening he and Bill began the schooling that Flossy had planned. It was a full winter for the boys, the most important of their lives. Even when spring came, with its yawns and its drowsy fever, they begged that the lessons continue. Already the effect was beginning to show in the galley proof.
One morning in July, Jap had held down the office alone. Flossy was not well, and Ellis spent as much time with her as possible. Bill blustered in, a look of disgust in his brown eyes.
"Ain't nothin' doin' in town, 'cept at Summers's," he exploded, luxuriating in the kind of speech that was tabooed in the presence of his elders. "Only ad I could scare up was at Summers's, and Ellis don't want that."
Jap looked from the door, beyond the little village park and the hotel, to where the dingy white face of the saloon stared impudently upon the town.