Editorial Wild Oats | Page 3

alteration, or destruction. He glanced at it and his face clouded. He ran
his eye down the pages, and his countenance grew portentous. It was
easy to see that something was wrong. Presently he sprang up and said:
"Thunder and lightning! Do you suppose I am going to speak of those
cattle that way? Do you suppose my subscribers are going to stand such
gruel as that? Give me the pen!"
I never saw a pen scrape and scratch its way so viciously, or plough
through another man's verbs and adjectives so relentlessly. While he
was in the midst of his work, somebody shot at him through the open
window, and marred the symmetry of my ear.
"Ah," said he, "that is that scoundrel Smith, of the Moral Volcano--he
was due yesterday." And he snatched a navy revolver from his belt and
fired. Smith dropped, shot in the thigh. The shot spoiled Smith's aim,
who was just taking a second chance, and he crippled a stranger. It was
me. Merely a finger shot off.
Then the chief editor went on with his erasures and interlineations. Just
as he finished them a hand-grenade came down the stove-pipe, and the
explosion shivered the stove into a thousand fragments. However, it did
no further damage, except that a vagrant piece knocked a couple of my
teeth out.

"That stove is utterly ruined," said the chief editor.
I said I believed it was.
"Well, no matter--don't want it this kind of weather. I know the man
that did it. I'll get him. Now, here is the way this stuff ought to be
written."
I took the manuscript. It was scarred with erasures and interlineations
till its mother wouldn't have known it if it had had one. It now read as
follows:
"SPIRIT OF THE TENNESSEE PRESS
"The inveterate liars of the Semi-Weekly Earthquake are evidently
endeavoring to palm off upon a noble and chivalrous people another of
their vile and brutal falsehoods with regard to that most glorious
conception of the nineteenth century, the Ballyhack railroad. The idea
that Buzzardville was to be left off at one side originated in their own
fulsome brains--or rather in the settlings which they regard as brains.
They had better swallow this lie if they want to save their abandoned
reptile carcasses the cowhiding they so richly deserve.
"That ass, Blossom, of the Higginsville Thunderbolt and Battle-Cry of
Freedom, is down here again sponging at the Van Buren.
"We observe that the besotted blackguard of the Mud Springs Morning
Howl is giving out, with his usual propensity for lying, that Van Werter
is not elected. The heaven-born mission of journalism is to disseminate
truth: to eradicate error; to educate, refine, and elevate the tone of
public morals and manners, and make all men more gentle, more
virtuous, more charitable, and in all ways better, and holier, and happier;
and yet this black-hearted scoundrel degrades his great office
persistently to the dissemination of falsehood, calumny, vituperation,
and vulgarity.
"Blathersville wants a Nicholson pavement--it wants a jail and a
poor-house more. The idea of a pavement in a one-horse town

composed of two gin-mills, a blacksmith-shop, and that mustard-plaster
of a newspaper, the Daily Hurrah! The crawling insect, Buckner, who
edits the Hurrah, is braying about this business with his customary
imbecility, and imagining that he is talking sense."
"Now that is the way to write--peppery and to the point.
Mush-and-milk journalism gives me the fan-tods."
About this time a brick came through the window with a splintering
crash, and gave me a considerable of a jolt in the back. I moved out of
range--I began to feel in the way.
The chief said: "That was the Colonel, likely. I've been expecting him
for two days. He will be up now right away."
He was correct. The Colonel appeared in the door a moment afterwards
with a dragoon revolver in his hand.
He said: "Sir, have I the honor of addressing the poltroon who edits this
mangy sheet?"
"You have. Be seated, sir. Be careful of the chair, one of its legs is gone.
I believe I have the honor of addressing the putrid liar, Colonel
Blatherskite Tecumseh?"
"Right, sir. I have a little account to settle with you. If you are at leisure
we will begin."
"I have an article on the 'Encouraging Progress of Moral and
Intellectual Development in America' to finish, but there is no hurry.
Begin."
Both pistols rang out their fierce clamor at the same instant. The chief
lost a lock of his hair, and the Colonel's bullet ended its career in the
fleshy part of my thigh. The Colonel's left shoulder was clipped a little.
They fired again. Both missed their men this time, but I got my share, a
shot in the arm. At the