WHO IS THE HANDSOMEST MAN IN GIBEON That was her great idea, born of her interview with Lancelot Bangs. “If papers run beauty contests for women,” she said, “why not run handsome contests for men?... Anyhow, it’ll be fun, and I’m entitled to a little pleasure. Men are vain. It will make talk, and talk is advertising, and advertising pays.” Evan inveighed against the scheme as undignified, stultifying, and belittling to a dignified profession. “If it brings in subscriptions--and dollars,” said Carmel, “we should worry!” Evan closed his eyes in pain. “_We should worry!_... I beg of you.... That barbaric phrase! The basest _argot_. Our newspapers should be the palladium of the purity of the language. If such expressions are tolerated----” He stopped abruptly because his mind could not encompass the horrors which would result from their toleration. “Anyhow, I’m going to do it--and you’ll see. A regular voting. Coupons and everything. We’ll have a six months’ subscription worth fifty votes, a year’s subscription worth a hundred votes.” “But--er--who will they vote for?” “Just wait,” she said. Following which she proceeded with enthusiasm. First she printed the rules of the contest in the _Free Press_, and then she went to Tubal. “I want to stick things up all over the township,” she said, “telling about it.” “We got a mess of yaller stock,” he said. “You write it out and I’ll print it, and we’ll make the Prof. go and paste ’em up.” So it was done, and on a day Gibeon awoke to find itself placarded with large yellow notices making it know that the _Free Press_ was in a fever to discover who was considered the handsomest man in town, and to read the paper for particulars. Carmel was right--it caused talk.... In other matters she was feeling her way, and the way was not plain to her. Of petty news there was aplenty, and this she printed. She also printed a trifling item about a traveling salesman who had been “making” the territory for years in a buggy, and who had been detected in the act of smuggling a few bottles of liquor over the border in his sample case, thus adding to a meager income. “There’s your vast liquor traffic,” she said to Evan Pell, “a poor, fat little drummer with six bottles of whisky.” “Um!... Who arrested him?” “Deputy Jenney,” she said. “There is,” said Evan, “a phrase which I have noted in the public prints. It is, ‘strangling competition.’” “What do you mean?” “Why--er--if you were engaged in a--profitable enterprise, and some individual--er--encroached, you would abate him, would you not? That is the ethics of business.” “Do you infer this drummer was abated as a competitor?” “Oh, not in the least--not in the least!” He spoke airily, as one who disposes of a troublesome child.