been interested in teaching his remaining son a good loose
trade.

Directly after the apotheosis of Merle his brother had been taken to the
_Advance_ office where, perched upon a high stool, his bare legs
intricately entwined among its rungs, he had been taught the surface
mysteries of typesetting. At first he was merely let to set up quads in
his stick, though putting leads between the lines and learning the use
of his steel rule. Then he was taught the location of the boxes in the
case and was allowed to set real type. By the time Sam Pickering noted
the moving signs in Dave the boy was struggling with copy and winning
his father's praise for his aptitude. True, he too often neglected to
reach to the upper case for capital letters, and the galley proofs of
his takes were not as clean as they should have been, but he was
learning. His father said so.

Every Wednesday he earned a real quarter by sitting against the wall
back of the hand press and inking the forms while his father ran off the
edition. This was better fun than typesetting. Before you was a long
roller on two other long rollers, and at your right hand was a small
roller with which you picked up ink from a stone, rolling it across and
across with a spirited crackle; then you ran the small roller the length
of the long roller; then you turned a crank that revolved the two lower
rollers, thus distributing the ink evenly over the upper one. After that
you ran the upper roller out over the two forms of type on the press
bed.

Dave Cowan, across the press, the sleeves of his pink-striped shirt
rolled to his elbows, then let down a frame in which he had fixed a
virgin sheet of paper, ran the bed of the press back under a weighted
shelf, and pulled a mighty lever to make the imprint. Wilbur had heard
the phrase "power of the press." He conceived that this was what the
phrase meant--this pulling of the lever. Surmounting the framework of
the press was a bronze eagle with wings out-spread for flight. His
father told him, the first day of his service, that this bird would flap
its wings and scream three times when the last paper was run off. This
would be the signal for Terry Stamper, the devil, to go across to
Vielhaber's and fetch a pail of beer. Wilbur had waited for this
phenomenon, only to believe, after repeated disappointments, that it was
one of his father's jokes, though it was true that Terry Stamper brought
the beer, which was drunk by Dave and Terry an