They filed out slowly, awed by the grief in the voice of Ellis's boy.
With the old types, on the old Washington hand press, they printed the first Herald of the new régime. With the exception of the greeting on the front page, every word was reprinted from the predictions written by Ellis in the years agone, and the greeting, in long pica on the first page, was his telegram to them and his townsmen received that morning.
When the last paper was printed by the two sad-faced boys on their day of jubilee, and the pile had been folded and carried downstairs, Jap closed the press upon the inky type, and gathered the great bunches of fragrant blossoms and heaped them upon the press, to be forever silent. With a groan of anguish, he threw himself against them. Bill slipped his arm through Jap's, and together they celebrated the day that was Ellis's. And in the night the telegram came:
"At rest. FLOSSY."
CHAPTER X
When Ellis went away it was to the sound of jollity. He came back to a town shrouded in mourning. Every store was closed, and symbols of grief adorned most of them. Wat Harlow, with a delicacy Ellis would scarcely have expected of him, had ordered purple ribbon and white flowers to tie with the crape. Silent and grief-stricken, the town stood waiting the arrival of the train. When it came, the coffin was lifted by loving hands and carried the ten long blocks to the church. No cold hearse rattled his precious body, but, even as the body of Robert Louis Stevenson was held by human touch until the last office was done, so was Ellis Hinton, the country printer, carried to his last repose by the hands of his friends.
Not until Jap looked for a long, anguished moment upon the flower-massed grave did he realize that he was alone, that he was drifting, that he had no anchor. Something of this he expressed to Flossy, between dry sobs, when they had left Ellis alone in the secluded little cemetery. Her eyes burned with a strange, maternal light as she comforted the boy whose grief was of the fibre of her own.
"Ellis knew that you would feel that way," she said gently, "and because of that, he made a will that is to be read to-night. Wat Harlow has it. Until it is read, I want you not to trouble."
That evening, with all the important men of the town assembled in the big front room of the Herald office, Wat Harlow read brokenly the last "reading notice" of Bloomtown's sleeping hero. It was written in the familiar scrawl that everybody knew, with scarcely a waver in its lines to tell that a dying hand had penned it: