“Why not, I’d like to know?” “Because,” said Tubal, “it owes about two hundred dollars more’n it’s wuth ... and, now we lost the county advertisin’, it’ll owe a dum sight more.” He walked to the door which gave from the front of the shop to the business and editorial office of the paper, and there he stood as if upon some vantage point, surveying all that existed of the Gibeon _Free Press_. What he saw was not especially inviting; nowhere was an indication of that romance which is believed to lurk about the business of disseminating news. The shop wore the haphazard look of a junk yard, contented to recline and snore in dust and frowziness. The room wore the air of a place where nothing ever happens and where nothing is apt to happen.... Just inside the door squatted the antiquated, limping cylinder press which gave birth weekly to the _Free Press_, and which gave off with sullen brazenness the look of overmuch child-bearing. It knew it was going to break down in the middle of every run, and it had been cursed at so often and so fluently that it was utterly indifferent. It was a press without ambition. Of late years it had gotten into a frame of mind where it didn’t care a hang whether it printed a paper or not--which is an alarming state of mind for a printing press to be in.... Over to the right were shelves of stock, ill sorted, dusty, dog eared at the corners where Tubal had rubbed his shoulder against them in passing. Thin stacks of red and blue board, upon which tickets for the Methodist lawn sociable or the Baptist chicken dinner might be painted, lopped with discouraged limpness over the edge of the shelving and said improper and insulting things to the slatternly press. A couple of stones elbowed each other and a case of type a little further back, and a comparatively new (and unpaid-for) job press, whose paint still existed even to shininess in spots, rather stuck up its nose at the rest of the company and felt itself altogether too good for such society. There was also a theoretical spittoon--theoretical because it was the one spot in the room safe from Tubal’s unerring jets of tobacco juice. These were the high spots arising from a jumble of rubbish which it was easier to kick about from place to place than to remove altogether.... Tubal waggled his head.