ratefully. He gazed fondly after the boy
and saw him start up the Enterprise stairs. I said:

"I wish you could help me get that school business, but since you can't,
I must run up to the Union office and see if I can get them to let me
have a proof of it after they have set it up, though I don't begin to
suppose they will. Good night."

"Hold on a minute. I don't mind getting the report and sitting around
with the boys a little, while you copy it, if you're willing to drop down
to the principal's with me."

"Now you talk like a rational being. Come along."

We plowed a couple of blocks through the snow, got the report and
returned to our office. It was a short document and soon copied.
Meantime Boggs helped himself to the punch. I gave the manuscript back
to him and we started out to get an inquest, for we heard pistol shots
near by. We got the particulars with little loss of time, for it was
only an inferior sort of bar-room murder, and of little interest to the
public, and then we separated. Away at three o'clock in the morning,
when we had gone to press and were having a relaxing concert as usual
--for some of the printers were good singers and others good performers on
the guitar and on that atrocity the accordion--the proprietor of the
Union strode in and desired to know if anybody had heard anything of
Boggs or the school report. We stated the case, and all turned out to
help hunt for the delinquent. We found him standing on a table in a
saloon, with an old tin lantern in one hand and the school report in the
other, haranguing a gang of intoxicated Cornish miners on the iniquity of
squandering the public moneys on education "when hundreds and hundreds of
honest hard-working men are literally starving for whiskey." [Riotous
applause.] He had been assisting in a regal spree with those parties for
hours. We dragged him away and put him to bed.

Of course there was no school report in the Union, and Boggs held me
accountable, though I was innocent of any intention or desire to compass
its absence from that paper and was as sorry as any one that the
misfortune had occurred.

But we were perfectly friendly. The day that the school report was next
due, the proprietor of the "Genessee" mine furnished us a buggy and asked
us to go down and write something about the property--a very common
request and one always gladly acceded to when people furnished buggies,
for we were as fond of pleasure excursions