Читать книгу The 13th District. A Story of a Candidate онлайн

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The caller was a little man, who walked with stooped shoulders, swung a slender stick energetically as he advanced, and continued to twist it nervously when he had come. His head was but thinly covered with lank, moist hair, as was shown when he pushed back the sun-burned straw hat he wore. This moisture seemed to be general in his whole system. It was apparent in the perspiring hand he gave to Garwood; it affected the short mustache, dyed a dull, lifeless black, at which he scratched with a black-edged finger nail as he talked, when he was not plucking at the few hairs that strayed on his chin. This moisture showed again in his blue eyes, from which it had almost washed the color. After he had been shut in the room with Garwood for half an hour, the air was laden with alcoholic fumes, which, exuding from his whole body, may have accounted for his moist personality. While he talked he chewed and puffed a glossy yellow cigar.

This man was Freeman H. Pusey, and he was publisher, editor, reporter, all in one, of the Grand Prairie Evening News. His journal was a small one of four pages, for the most part given over to boiler-plate matter, but it carried a column of “locals,” a portentous editorial page, and took on a happy, almost gala expression whenever it could exploit, under the heavy ragged type in which its headlines were set, some scandal that would shock Grand Prairie. In politics the News claimed to be independent, which meant that it leaned far to one side in one campaign, and as far to the other in the next; indeed, it sometimes held these two extreme positions in the same campaign, and found no difficulty in vindicating its policy.