Page:Harold Titus--Timber.djvu/88

80 the good humor, the words of the dying woman last night echoed in his ears and made him uneasy so long as he was within sight of Harris.

The office of the Blueberry Banner was a dingy, dusty, dark little place, smelling as all newspaper offices have smelled from time beyond reckoning. An unpainted partition divided the front from the back office and it was plastered with newspaper clippings, many of them yellowed by age and dimmed by accumulated dust. The floor was of pine, the boards worn thin except where brown knots showed up like wens. A table in one corner was stacked high with a mixture of unopened mail, bundles of old papers and what not. Dusty files of the Banner, bound in calf-skin, reposed on shelves; a picture of Lincoln hung askew over them and on the opposite wall was a lithograph of Hazen S. Pingree.

At a cluttered desk sat an old man, a small, round, old man, who struck John at once as being the original for all the Santa Clauses that ever tooled a reindeer foursome. He was writing and as Taylor entered he looked up, put the thick lead of his pencil against the tip of his tongue and studied the new comer abstractedly with his bright blue eyes. The pencil went to the pad and laboriously scrawled a coarse line; then the blue eyes came back to John's face, twinkling brightly this time.

"Good morning, Mr. Taylor," he said.

John smiled. "News travels quickly."

"Yes. There's little fresh in a weekly newspaper up here except the advertising and plate matter. Have a chair; make yourself comfortable."

"I suppose you, like every one else, know why I am up here?"