To anyone not acquainted with Welsh the _Declarator_ appeared to be a blackmail sheet. It was not. Old P. K. was firm in the belief that he was doing God's work and that the _Declarator_ was meant to be God's instrument. He quoted Scripture in his columns to declare that those who were not with him were against him, and that those who were against him were against God. One by one he took up propaganda that he believed righteous, and took them up with all the violence of a fanatic. He was the first man in Riverbank to cry aloud for prohibition, but he was also the first to shriek anti-Catholicism. He held up good, old Father Moran as an Antichrist, and pleaded that he be driven from town. He was continually advocating violence in words that to-day would have landed him in prison. With his abusive “Briefs” and his inflammatory editorials he became, in a small way, a nuisance to the town; with his nagging for advertisements he became a nuisance to the merchants. His wife was a simple-minded, easy-going creature, wrinkled and with a brown wig inclosed in a hair net. The wig looked less like a head covering than some sort of brown-hair pudding. On the whole, ridiculous as the wig was, it was better than nothing, for Mrs. Welsh was as bald as a billiard ball. These were the parents of Lanny Welsh; they might well have served as an excuse for worthlessness in the boy, but this may be said for Riverbank--it does not damn the child because of the parents. Lanny Welsh won his own tag; at any rate it was given him through what the town knew of the boy, and not through what it knew of old P. K. and Lanny's mother. You may imagine Lanny Welsh with bright, blue eyes and curly, brown hair, slender, lithe and a little taller than the average. He had a smile that would charm the heart out of a misanthrope. When he smiled his eyes brightened, the corners of his lips seemed to become alight with good nature, and a dimple flickered in his left cheek. As a boy he was needlessly cruel, but perhaps no more than the average boy, and charmingly sweet in his ways and words when he was not cruel. His mother let him tread on her in everything; old P. K. seemed hardly to know the boy was alive except when he arose in Biblical wrath over some escapade, and beat the boy outrageously with a leathern strap. Lanny howled when he was being beaten, and forgot the admonitions that accompanied them as soon as he was safe outside the woodshed.