“If you should happen to go to the Chronicle-Abstract folks,” the editor called after him, “you can tell them I suggested your coming.”
The managing editor of the Chronicle-Abstract was reading a manuscript, and he did not desist from his work on Bartley's appearance, which he gave no sign of welcoming. But he had a whimsical, shrewd, kind face, and Bartley felt that he should get on with him, though he did not rise, and though he let Bartley stand.
“Yes,” he said. “Lumbering, hey? Well, there's some interest in that, just now, on account of this talk about the decay of our shipbuilding interests. Anything on that point?”
“That's the very point I touch on first,” said Bartley.
The editor stopped turning over his manuscript. “Let's see,” he said, holding out his hand for Bartley's article. He looked at the first head-line, “What I Know about Logging,” and smiled. “Old, but good.” Then he glanced at the other headings, and ran his eye down the long strips on which Bartley had written; nibbled at the text here and there a little; returned to the first paragraph, and read that through; looked back at something else, and then read the close.
“I guess you can leave it,” he said, laying the manuscript on the table.
“No, I guess not,” said Bartley, with equal coolness, gathering it up.
The editor looked fairly at him for the first time, and smiled. Evidently he liked this. “What's the reason? Any particular hurry?”
“I happen to know that the Events is going to send a man down East to write up this very subject. And I don't propose to leave this article here till they steal my thunder, and then have it thrown back on my hands not worth the paper it's written on.”
The editor tilted himself back in his chair and braced his knees against his table. “Well, I guess you're right,” he said. “What do you want for it?”