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Page 57
He was right. No sooner had the advertisement appeared than the
editor found that everybody believed it to be a sheer invention of
his own to "once more boom" the "Clarion." If they had doubted
MR. Dimmidge, they utterly rejected MRS. Dimmidge as an advertiser!
It was a stale joke that nobody would follow up; and on the heels of
this came a letter from the editor-in-chief.
MY DEAR BOY,--You meant well, I know, but the second Dimmidge "ad"
was a mistake. Still, it was a big bluff of yours to show the
money, and I send you back your hundred dollars, hoping you won't
"do it again." Of course you'll have to keep the advertisement in
the paper for two issues, just as if it were a real thing, and it's
lucky that there's just now no pressure in our columns. You might
have told a better story than that hogwash about your finding the
"ad" and a hundred dollars lying loose on your desk one morning.
It was rather thin, and I don't wonder the foreman kicked.
The young editor was in despair. At first he thought of writing to
Mrs. Dimmidge at the Elktown Post-Office, asking her to relieve him
of his vow of secrecy; but his pride forbade. There was a humorous
concern, not without a touch of pity, in the faces of his
contributors as he passed; a few affected to believe in the new
advertisement, and asked him vague, perfunctory questions about it.
His position was trying, and he was not sorry when the term of his
engagement expired the next week, and he left Calaveras to take his
new position on the San Francisco paper.
He was standing in the saloon of the Sacramento boat when he felt a
sudden heavy pressure on his shoulder, and looking round sharply,
beheld not only the black-bearded face of Mr. Dimmidge, lit up by a
smile, but beside it the beaming, buxom face of Mrs. Dimmidge,
overflowing with good-humor. Still a little sore from his past
experience, he was about to address them abruptly, when he was
utterly vanquished by the hearty pressure of their hands and the
unmistakable look of gratitude in their eyes.
"I was just saying to 'Lizy Jane," began Mr. Dimmidge breathlessly,
"if I could only meet that young man o' the 'Clarion' what brought
us together again"--
"You'd be willin' to pay four times the amount we both paid him,"
interpolated the laughing Mrs. Dimmidge.
"But I didn't bring you together," burst out the dazed young man,
"and I'd like to know, in the name of Heaven, what brought you
together now?"
"Don't you see, lad," said the imperturbable Mr. Dimmidge, "'Lizy
Jane and myself had qua'lled, and we just unpacked our fool
nonsense in your paper and let the hull world know it! And we both
felt kinder skeert and shamed like, and it looked such small
hogwash, and of so little account, for all the talk it made, that
we kinder felt lonely as two separated fools that really ought to
share their foolishness together."
"And that ain't all," said Mrs. Dimmidge, with a sly glance at her
spouse, "for I found out from that 'Personal' you showed me that
this particular old fool was actooally jealous!--JEALOUS!"
"And then?" said the editor impatiently.
"And then I KNEW he loved me all the time."
THE SECRET OF SOBRIENTE'S WELL
Even to the eye of the most inexperienced traveler there was no
doubt that Buena Vista was a "played-out" mining camp. There,
seamed and scarred by hydraulic engines, was the old hillside, over
whose denuded surface the grass had begun to spring again in fitful
patches; there were the abandoned heaps of tailings already
blackened by sun and rain, and worn into mounds like ruins of
masonry; there were the waterless ditches, like giant graves, and
the pools of slumgullion, now dried into shining, glazed cement.
There were two or three wooden "stores," from which the windows and
doors had been taken and conveyed to the newer settlement of
Wynyard's Gulch. Four or five buildings that still were inhabited--
the blacksmith's shop, the post-office, a pioneer's cabin, and the
old hotel and stage-office--only accented the general desolation.
The latter building had a remoteness of prosperity far beyond the
others, having been a wayside Spanish-American posada, with adobe
walls of two feet in thickness, that shamed the later shells of
half-inch plank, which were slowly warping and cracking like dried
pods in the oven-like heat.
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