im it a bit. The old man turned on his heel without a
word and that week he kindled his old-time fires and wrote the following
for the local page:

A citizen of Homeburg who hasn't done anything more exciting for twenty
years than stand off his grocery bill poked fun at the _Democrat_ last
week to our face because there wasn't any more news in it. News, say
we--News in Homeburg? News in a town where an ice-cream social is a
sensation and a dog fight suspends business for three hours? News in a
town where it takes a couple five years to work up a wedding and seven
kinds of wedding cake is the only news in it? Where the city marshal
hasn't made an arrest for two years because no one has done anything
after nine P.M. except snore, and where they have to put up the lamps in
pairs to keep them from getting lonesome? We don't print news from
Homeburg because there isn't any, and the old rooster who joshed us
knows it. He's sore because we can't make half a column out of his trip
to Paynesville eight miles away last summer, but we'll promise to do
better. We'll dump the paste pot in the fire, throw the old shears out
of the window and get out a regular screamer of a _Democrat_ some week;
a paper with red ink on it and big headlines and a real piece of news in
it. We will when this gabby old fossil does his part. When he pays his
six years' subscription, we'll write two columns about it. And even then
no one will believe it.

Lafe Simpson, who runs the _Argus_, is a younger man than Ayers and more
ambitious. Oh, yes, we have two papers. In a town the size of Homeburg
you simply have to have two papers, because half of the people are
always mad at one paper. The _Argus_ and _Democrat_ trade subscription
lists about every seven years--not counting the hard-shell Democrats and
blown-in-the-bottle Republicans who have to stand by their papers
whether they get mad at them or not. I've been taking the _Democrat_ for
about five years because Simpson got too busy in the school election one
year to suit me. It's pretty hard on me, because Simpson runs a better
paper; but my neighbor, Sim Askinson, likes the _Democrat_ better and
can't take it because he took his whole family to Chicago one week, and
Ayers overlooked the fact. So he borrows my _Democrat_ every week and I
get his _Argus_, and thus both of us preserve our mad and our dignity
and get what we want just the same.

If there's anything keener than the competition between