Bildungsromans; Fathers and sons -- Fiction; Young men -- Fiction
“Give me a lead. I want one more front page lead,” The Skipper kept
bawling at them, working like mad.
At ten thirty the door opened and Harrigan, accompanied by Frank, came
in. Seeing Sam they stopped, looking at him uncertainly, and at the man
at work at the desk.
“Well, speak up. This is no ladies’ reception room. What do you fellows
want?” snapped The Skipper, glaring at them.
Frank, coming forward, laid a typewritten sheet on the desk, which the
newspaper man read hurriedly.
“Will you use it?” asked Frank.
The Skipper laughed.
“Wouldn’t change a word of it,” he shouted. “Sure I’ll use it. It’s what
I wanted to make my point. You fellows watch me.”
Frank and Harrigan went out and The Skipper, rushing to the door, began
yelling into the room beyond.
“Hey, you Shorty and Tom, I’ve got that last lead.”
Coming back to his desk he began writing again, grinning as he worked.
To Sam he handed the typewritten sheet prepared by Frank.
“Dastardly attempt to win the cause of the working girls by dirty scab
leaders and butter-fingered capitalist class,” it began, and after
this followed a wild jumble of words, words without meaning, sentences
without point in which Sam was called a mealy-mouthed mail-order musser
and The Skipper was mentioned incidentally as a pusillanimous ink
slinger.
“I’ll run the stuff and comment on it,” declared The Skipper, handing
Sam what he had written. It was an editorial inviting the public to
read the article prepared for publication by the strike leaders and
sympathising with the striking girls that their cause had to be lost
because of the incompetence and lack of intelligence of their leaders.
“Hurrah for Roughhouse, the brave man who leads working girls to defeat
in order that he may retain leadership and drive intelligent effort out
of the cause of labour,” wrote The Skipper.
Sam looked at the sheets and out of the window where a snow storm
raged. It seemed to him that a crime was being done and he was sick and
disgusted at his own inability to stop it. The Skipper lighted a short
black pipe and took his cap from a nail on the wall.
“I’m the smoothest little newspaper thing in town and some financier as
well,” he declared. “Let’s go have a drink.”
After the drink Sam walked through the town toward the country. At the
edge of town where the houses became scattered and the road started to
drop away into a deep valley some one helloed behind him. Turning, he
saw the soft-eyed Jewish girl running along a path beside the road.
“Where are you going?” he asked, stopping to lean against a board fence,
the snow falling upon his face.
“I’m going with you,” said the girl. “You’re the best and the strongest
man I’ve ever seen and I’m not going to let you get away. If you’ve got
a wife it don’t matter. She isn’t what she should be or you wouldn’t be
walking about the country alone. Harrigan and Frank say you’re crazy,
but I know better. I am going with you and I’m going to help you find
what you want.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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