1 At the Sign of the Leaf

Young Harry Beauchamp, the editor and sole proprietor of the Groveton Herald, sat at his desk, writing. It was late in the night, very late for any one to be up and about his business, in a little city in Kentucky, just where the sinking mountains make their last, low swell, and meet the great dark tobacco region that sweeps to the west and south, over the rich black soil of thirty counties. Until he bought the Herald, and turned it into a daily, there was no just reason why anyone in Groveton should be out of bed after midnight, and most of them were in it by ten.

But it was now one in the morning of a very hot night, and Harry Beauchamp still worked. He had taken off his coat and collar, and, when he raised his head from the paper now and then to meet any stray bit of breeze that might wander in, he revealed a fine strong young face, with gray eyes, and the firm pointed chin that so often goes with character. His thick fair hair was brushed back from a broad brow, tanned somewhat by the sun.

A puff of air, not enough to be called a breeze, but just a wandering heated fragment of wind, entered the open window, and something hanging over the desk at which the young editor was writing, rustled dryly and dismally. It was a “hand” of tobacco, five or six long dark leaves, tied together with another leaf, wrapped several times around the ends, and then fastened in a peculiar knot. It was a magnificent “hand,” one of the finest specimens of the dark tobacco region, rich, heavy and of uncommon length, the master-product of some skillful grower.

As the young editor bent his head again to the article that he was writing the “hand” of tobacco gave forth another dismal rustle. The leaves, delicate and sensitive to the temperature were hard and dry, and minute dusty scales fell from them, striking now upon Harry Beauchamp’s hair, and now and then upon his desk.

As the puffs of dry hot wind grew a little stronger the longest leaf blew out from the wall, and writhed over this head in the startling likeness of a coiling serpent about to strike. He looked up once, and the impression upon his imaginative mind was so vivid that he shuddered. But he saw more in it than the simile of a serpent. It was the flaunting symbol of mastery over all that region, over all whom he loved or for whom he cared, and he felt a shudder of revulsion. His thoughts were not put into words, but if so they would have been: “Curse tobacco, I wish that we had never seen or heard of it in this state.”

He reached up at the coiling leaf, intending to tear down the whole “hand” and throw it into the waste basket, but it eluded his grasp, fluttering away, and he did not make a second attempt. “Let it stay,” he thought, “after all it tells the truth, and it is the symbol of what is. Let it stay until its flaunting becomes a falsehood.”

He returned to his writing, and the hand continued to rustle dismally above his head. The night became hotter and closer. It is a region in which winter can come down, stern and fierce, while summer may rush to the other extreme. Already the hot wave had lasted three days, and the oldest inhabitant was dumb before it. Groveton might be in its bed but it could not sleep. The close, dense air, heavy to the breath, hung like a pall, inside and out.

Harry laid down pencil and paper, for a moment, and went to the window. The last puff of air passed, and was gone. The heat lay close and still, but he stood there, gazing out over the Groveton in which he was born, and which he loved, a trim, tidy little city of ten thousand, the greatest centre in the dark tobacco region, and an important market also for the mountains that lay just to the east. The night was clear, filled with starshine, and he could see even now the dim blue line of ridges. Perhaps it was cool up there on the crests.

He turned back to his desk, and a long, thin man, red of head and beard, and, clad only in a shirt, trousers and carpet slippers, entered the room, carrying in his hand a bunch of proofs, which he laid on Harry’s desk.

“All ready, Mr. Boshong,” he said. “They are waitin’ on nothin’ but your editorial.”

Harry sighed.

“Jim,” he said, “I know I’m behind, and I’ve less excuse too than anybody else, but this tobacco business is getting on my nerves.”

“Mebee it’s not tobacco, but the heat,” said Jim Steptoe sympathetically. “It shorely does lay a pow’ful hold on you. I remember old Bill Dalton who was in the Mexican war. When he come back Squire Stanley met him in the road. ‘Well, Bill’ says the Squire, ‘you’ve been through the Mexican War, and you’re a hero.’ ‘Yes’ says Bill modestly. ‘You were at Buena Vista, Bill?’ ‘No, Squire,’ says Bill shaking his head. ‘I wasn’t at Buena Vista.’ ‘But you were at Cerro Gordo?’ ‘No, Squire, I wasn’t at Cerro Gordo.’ ‘Then you were at Chapultepec?’ ‘No, Squire, I wasn’t at Chapultepec.’ ‘Then,’ says the Squire, surprised like, ‘what battles were you in, Bill?’ ‘I wasn’t in any of them battles,’ says Bill, ‘but I was in the hottest hot wave down thar’ in Mexico the world has ever seed,’ and do you know, Mr. Boshong, I think the laugh wasn’t so much on Bill after all.”

“No, I suppose not,” said Harry smiling, “but it’s really the tobacco, Jim, and not the heat. My sympathies are with the people, our people, but I can’t endorse this beating of farmers and burning of tobacco barns which the Band of Justice winks at.”

“No, Mr. Boshong,” said Jim Steptoe doubtfully, “but on the other hand thar’s the trust, an’ the other big manufacturers which have joined together an’ which held all the tobacco growers by the throat. The big trust made twenty million dollars last year. You wrote in the Herald yesterday that their report showed it, an’ I didn’t know thar was so much money in the world. I don’t see much of it ’roun’ here among the people that grow the tobacco.”

Harry sighed again. He knew very well where Jim Steptoe’s heart lay, and Jim’s judgment and acts were generally in the same place.

“Tell them I’ll be ready in ten minutes Jim,” he said, and then both stood quite still, listening to the beat of horses’ feet in the street. It was an unusual sound at this time of the night, and the stillness and the heat, that had been supreme, made it all the louder. The hard paving gave back the hoofbeats in a sharp threatening echo. Suddenly they stopped. There was a moment of ominous silence, and then came rapid footsteps on the Herald stairway.

A dozen men entered the office of the young editor. Every one of them wore a crude white mask made of cloth, with slits for the eyes. All were armed. Some carried rifles and others revolvers. The hand of Jim Steptoe crept down toward his trousers’ pocket, but Harry saw him and gave a signal. Jim’s hand stopped. Harry was standing by his desk, and the masked men ranged themselves in a line before him. He was not at all afraid, but he was angry and indignant that his offices should be invaded in such a manner. The raiders, in their awkward disguise, looked grotesque, but he knew that they could be dangerous. A tall, heavily built man, who seemed to be the leader, stepped forward, and said in a threatening tone:

“We’ve come to tell you, Harry Boshong, that we don’t like the way you’ve been handlin’ the Herald.”

“Well,” said Harry mildly although there was fire in his veins. “You must admit that it’s my paper.”

“That’s so,” replied the man—and Harry thought he recognized the voice, “but when you’re talkin’ about people you’ve got to mind what you say.”

“For instance?”

“Well now, about this tobacco business an’ the Band of Justice. Either a man has got to be for the growers an’ against the trust or for the trust an’ against the growers.”

“How about the beatings and the barn burnings?”

“Fellows that didn’t stand true to their word, or that didn’t come in when they ought to have come in. What we want to know, is this newspaper for us or against us?”

There was a threatening murmur from the other men, as the speaker asked his question. Harry flushed. He knew the intensity of feeling that the tobacco question had aroused in Kentucky, he knew that these men were in deadly earnest, sure that they were right, but he was equally sure that he should be the judge of his own course. He was still unafraid, but he was more angry than ever that men, with their faces hidden, should seek to dictate to him.

“I both own and edit the Herald,” he replied slowly, that no word might be mistaken, “and I choose its policy. I will not be compelled.”

He saw the hands of the men, behind the leader, steal toward their weapons, but the spokesman waved them down.

“We don’t want it said about us that we didn’t give anybody a fair chance,” he said. “This is our first call; so we tell you, Harry Boshong, if you don’t say the right thing in your paper you’d better look out.”

He turned, and, followed by the others, dashed down the steps. Harry Beauchamp’s anger burst into a flash of fury. He snatched a revolver from the drawer of this desk, and ran toward the head of the stairway, but it was now Jim Steptoe’s time to restrain.

“It ain’t no use, Mr. Boshong,” he said putting a strong hand on Harry’s arm. “They are too many an’ besides a fight wouldn’t do no good to nobody, not to them nor to you, nor to the farmers. Let ’em go.”

“You’re right, Jim,” said Harry. “We’ll let ’em go, but it’s a hard thing for a man to take words like those, in his own place.”

“Words don’t hurt much, ’cept when you have to eat ’em,” said Jim philosophically.

“I suppose so,” said Harry, “and now that this interlude is over I’ll finish that article. It will be ready in five minutes.”

He sat down again at his desk. He had been writing an editorial, condemning the use of violence by the Band of Justice, as the association of tobacco farmers, allied against the buyers, called themselves. He had been hesitating over the last paragraph, not knowing just what to say, but now winged words came to him. He himself was a threatened victim, they had talked to him of violence, they had undertaken to deprive him of free speech. He would show them! There was naturally hot blood in Harry Beauchamp’s veins. He was a Mason on his mother’s side, and the Masons had been pioneers, daring invaders of the Dark and Bloody Ground, foremost in Indian battle and in every war since. In that family the fighting quality had always ranked high, and now Harry Beauchamp’s pulse beat with the same feeling.

While he wrote, the long tobacco leaf again coiled and twisted, before the stray puffs of air, in the likeness of a serpent, above his head, and Jim Steptoe, who stood by, waiting for the copy, looked with understanding at Harry Beauchamp. He was, within his intellectual limitations, a fighting man himself, and he knew very well what was passing in the mind of his chief.

When Harry finished the editorial and handed it to Jim with; “There, take that in as soon as you can,” Jim held the sheets in his outstretched fingers, and looked at them curiously. The sense of touch alone seemed to tell him that the last page had something scorching about it.

Harry did not go down to see the paper off the press. He was too deeply disturbed. The little pulses in his temple were beating with anger, and the twin strains in his blood were at war with each other. It was the Mason inheritance to fight, but his peaceful Beauchamp father would counsel another course.

Jim Steptoe brought the paper after a while and laid it damp from the press on the table before him, but Harry took little notice. Jim knew that his chief’s pride had been hurt, and in a case like that nothing was to be said. So he stole softly out.

Harry Beauchamp thought that he had found a poor reward. Returning from the University of Virginia he had bought, with the aid of Christopher Lucas, a local banker, the dying Herald, then a weekly, and, through the force of fresh and strong ideas, he had made it better known than any other daily in the country, published in so small a city. He had always stood for law and order in Kentucky, and now he was threatened by a masked band of his own people.

The press ceased after a while to run. Everybody went home, except Harry and faithful Jim Steptoe, who waited in his own particular corner. It was far toward morning, but the heat still lay close and heavy. The leaves of the tobacco hand no longer coiled and fluttered, but hung straight down, dry and lifeless, the minute scales falling on the floor. Harry went once more to the window, seeking relief from the breathless room. Far down in the west showed a sudden flash of lightning, and then came the low mutter of distant thunder. Clouds already were creeping up the heavens, and dimming the starshine.

“That means the end of the hot wave, Mr. Boshong,” said Jim Steptoe at his elbow.

“Yes, thank you,” said Harry. Flash after flash of lightning cut the sky, the last star went out, and a sudden cool breath, the tip of the advancing storm, rushed in at the window. The tobacco hand fluttered wildly, and, dry and hard an hour ago, became soft and moist now, changing with the temperature.

“She is shore going to be a rip snorter!” said Jim Steptoe looking at the heavens, which had turned as black as ink, when the lightning was not blazing.

“Let it come, said Harry. The air had grown so cool that he put on his coat and collar again, and then, as they closed the windows, the first drops rattled on the glass like hail. Thunder and lightning ceased and, for over an hour, they heard only the sweep of the rushing rain, driving the hot wave away, refreshing the thirsty earth and making all things green again.

When the rain ceased, bright day had come, and Harry Beauchamp took his way home, where he would turn other people’s day into his night.

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