tiring as an antelope.
But the main reason for his granting my demand was that he could not
find anyone else to do the work on short notice. Printers were not to be
picked up on every quarter-section.

I made no reply to this letter. A week later I was perched on my high
stool at the nonpareil (a small six-point type) case when the stage
rolled in from Presho. Into the print shop walked a well-dressed
stranger, a slender, energetic man of medium height. He looked things
over--including me. And so I found myself face to face with the
proof-sheet king.

It did not take long to find out how little I knew about printing a
newspaper. So in desperation I laid before him an ambitious plan for
adding subscriptions and another page of home print filled with
advertising from Pierre.

The trip alone, he reminded me, would cost all of $10, probably $15.
"And besides," he added, "if you did get ads you couldn't set them up."
With that final fling at my inefficiency he took the stage on to Pierre.

The average newspaperman would have sneered at these plains printing
outfits, and thrown the junk out on the prairie to be buried under the
snowdrifts; but not many of us were eligible to the title. The McClure
_Press_ consisted of a few cases of old type, a couple of "forms," an
ink roller and a pot of ink; a tin slab laid on top of a rough frame for
a make-up table. Completing the outfit was a hand press--that's what
they called it, but it needed a ten-horsepower motor to run it; a flat
press which went back and forth under a heavy iron roller that was
turned with a crank like a clothes wringer. My whole outfit seemed to
have come from Noah's ark.

Most of the type was nicked, having suffered from the blows of Myrtle's
wooden hammer. She used the hammer when it failed to make a smooth
surface in the form that would pass under the roller. Readers had to
guess at about half the news I printed, and the United States Land
Office developed a sort of character system of deciphering the notices
which I filed every week.

But running proof notices was not merely the blacksmith job that Myrtle
had made it appear. It required accuracy to the _n_th degree. The proofs
ran something like this:

Blanche M. Bartine of McClure, S. D., who made Homestead Entry No.
216, Serial No. 04267, for the South One-half of the NE 1/4 and
North One-half of SE 1/4 of Section 9, Township 108 North, Range 78
West of the Fifth Principal Meri