"Well, somehow Braine isn't the sort of fellow you feel like slapping on the back."
It was Abner Hildreth who first drew Braine into relations with the Enterprise.
There was "one of Thebes's oldest and most genial citizens" – Jack Summers by name – who, in addition to a mercantile business, carried on a bank of the kind that opens in the evening by preference, while Abner Hildreth, in all his career as a banker, had preferred daylight hours for business.
Jack Summers corrupted the youth of the town, and when one promising young clerk in the Express office was caught opening money packages, his fall was clearly enough traced to his losses in Summers's establishment.
Hildreth, as a banker and business man, objected to gambling – of that kind. He saw how surely it must undermine the other kind by destroying the trustworthiness of clerks and cashiers. He deprecated it, also, as a thing imperilling the young prosperity of Thebes, in which his investments, as merchant, banker, hotel proprietor, mill owner and the like, were greater than those of any other ten men combined, while even with the other ten he was a silent partner so far as their ventures seemed to him sound.
"The town mustn't get a hard name," he said; "Jack Summers must shut up his gambling shop, or get out of Thebes."
Then he sent for Edgar Braine.
"That young fellow," he reflected, "knows how to write with vim, force, pathos, and energy" – a favorite phrase with Hildreth – "and he has sand in him too. He can skin Summers, and rub aqua fortis into the raw, and he ain't afraid to do it."
This latter point Hildreth knew to be important. Jack Summers was a reckless person of whom most men in Thebes were inclined to be somewhat in awe. He had lived in the place when the only law there was the will of the boldest, enforced with a pistol, and he had not yet reconciled himself to milder methods.
"I want you to score Jack Summers in the Enterprise, Edgar." It was Hildreth's habit to go straight to the marrow of his undertakings. "I want you to drive him out of town, or compel him to shut up his den. He is ruining all the boys, and giving the town a bad name."
"But will Podauger let me?" asked Braine.
"Podauger" was the sobriquet by which old Janus Leftwitch – "Editor and Proprietor of the Thebes Daily Enterprise" – had come to be known, by reason of the ponderous unreadableness of his disquisitions.
"Podauger be – blessed! (I never swear, Braine.) I own Podauger. I can shut up his office to-day if I want to, and assign him a room in the poorhouse. He will print what I tell him to, and Mose Harbell will keep quiet too, when I tell him not to call Jack Summers 'our genial fellow citizen' again. The only question is, will you write the articles?"
"I will, on one condition."
"I didn't think you would be afraid."
"I'm not."
"What is the condition then?"
"That I am to be let alone. I won't begin a thing of that kind, and have it hushed up. It must go clear through if I undertake it."
"That's right. I knew you had sand. You may go ahead, and you shan't be stopped by anybody – unless Summers prepares your corpse for the coroner. Have you thought of that?"
"I am not afraid. The cause is a good one. That's all I ask."
"Very well. Now these articles must be editorials. They'll have more weight that way. Salivate the rascal every day, and I'll back you up. You'd better go armed, though, in case Summers suspects who it is."
"I will take care of that. The first article shall be ready in an hour."
And it was. Braine was too fresh from college not to begin it with an allusion to Roman history, but the people of Thebes were not sufficiently familiar with the classics to resent a reference of the kind. Besides, the allusion was an apt one. It was a reference to the Roman method of dealing with persons who made themselves enemies of the State, and it named Jack Summers as one who bore precisely that relation to Thebes.
There was something like an earthquake in the town that night. Never before had the Enterprise been known to say a harsh thing or a vigorous one. Podauger was never harsh in utterance, lest he offend a subscriber or advertiser; he was never vigorous, because he did not know how to be so. The terror of Jack Summers's displeasure was something that nobody in Thebes had ever before ventured to brave, and what with surprise, apprehension, and a looking-for of sensational results, the little city was in a ferment throughout the night.
Podauger had shut himself up in his room, and barred his door before the newspaper appeared on the streets. Not satisfied with these precautions, he determined to send a flag of truce to the enemy without delay. He wrote in his tangled fashion:
"Dear Mr. Summers:
"I cannot rest till I have acquitted myself of all responsibility for the outrageous assault upon the good name and repute of a fellow-citizen for whom I entertain so high a respect as I trust I have always manifested toward you, which appeared – or I should say, was made this afternoon upon you – in the newspaper of which I am the unhappy, though till now the happy, Editor and Proprietor. I cannot explain my situation in this affair without a breach of confidence which would imperil my present and future prosperity; but I can assure you that I had no more power to prevent this dastardly outrage, or to shut the noisome stuff out of columns which I take pride in remembering have always been courteous in their treatment of my fellow Thebans, than you are – I mean than you had.
"I am deeply agitated, and perhaps my diction is not as perspicuous as it is my proud endeavor to make it when I am inditing matter for publication, but you can make out this much, my dear and highly esteemed friend, that I shall not seek my couch with any hope or prospect of repose, until I receive from you an assurance that you acquit me of responsibility, and won't ask me to make an apology in the Enterprise, for reasons to which I have already alluded in reference to my present and temporary inability to control the conduct of that journal in matters relating to this outrageous affair.
"Do I make myself clear in this the hour of my agitation and humiliation?"
Janus Leftwitch's habit of writing in this fashion was so fixed that he could not write simply, even when he was scared. Summers understood him well enough, however, and wrote him in reply:
"Don't be scared, Pod. Nobody'll ever suspect you. You couldn't write that way if you tried. – Jack."
The next morning excitement was at fever heat. Curiosity to know who had written the article, was the dominant emotion. Excited apprehension of its author's speedy assassination came next.
Summers was in and out of various places of business all the morning, and in each he declared that if ever he learned who had written the article, he would "shoot him like a dog." Nobody doubted the sincerity of the threat, or the certainty of its execution.
About noon Summers was saying something of the kind in a little crowd of business men in front of Hildreth's bank, when Edgar Braine came up the street. He cheerily greeted the company with "Good morning, gentlemen," and then placed himself in front of Summers, and in a very quiet tone said:
"I hear you are going to shoot the writer of that article about you, as soon as you find out who he is. It would be a pity to let you shoot the wrong man by mistake. I should never cease to regret it, because I wrote the article myself, and have just finished a much severer one for to-day's paper."
This unexpected speech fell like a bombshell into the crowd, and Jack Summers was the one worst stunned by it.
He stood staring at Braine, apparently unable to comprehend what had happened. Nobody had ever confronted him in that daring fashion before, and in the novel circumstances he did not know what to do. He did nothing in fact, until Edgar turned to some one else in the