he arselickers, panders, arsonists,
kidnapers, cutthroats, pickpockets, abortionists, pilferers, cheats,
forgers, sneakthieves, sharpers and blackmailers since Jacob swindled
his brother. Do not fawn upon me little man, I am too old to want women
or money. The sands are running out and I shall never now read the
immortable Hobbes, but I'll not die in your bloody harness. In me you do
not see the man who picked up the torch of Franklin and Greeley and Dana
where Henry Watterson dropped it. Loose of your gangrenous chains, you
behold the freelance correspondent of the North American Newspaper
Alliance, the man who will devote his declining years to reporting in
the terse and vivid prose for which he is justly famous the progress of
the grass which strangles the country as you have tried to strangle me."

Again I put personal feelings aside. "If your mind is really made up,
we'll want your stuff for the _Intelligencer_, Bill."

"Sir, you may want. I hope the condition persists."

There being no profit in arguing with a madman, I made arrangements to
replace him immediately. I reproduce here, not for selfjustification,
which would be superfluous, but merely for what amusement it may afford,
one of his accounts which appeared in the columns of so many third and
fourth rate newspapers. I won't say it shows the decay of a once
possibly great mind, but it certainly reveals that the _Intelligencer_
suffered no irreparable loss.

"Today at Dubuque, Iowa, the Mississippi was crossed. Not by redmen in
canoes, nor white on logs or clumsy rafts, nor yet by multiwheeled
locomotives gliding over steel bridges nor airplanes so high the wide
stream was a thread below. Nature and devastation, hand in hand, for the
moment one and the same, crossed it today as Quantrell or Kirby Smith or
Nathan Bedford Forrest crossed it, sabers glittering, so many forgotten
years ago. But if the men in gray and butternut raided a store or burned
a tavern they thought it a mighty victory and went home rejoicing; the
green invader is an occupier and colonizer, come to remain for all time,
leaving no town, no road, no farm where it has passed.

"A few weeks ago Dubuque was still here, quiet, old and pleasant, the
butt of affectionate jokes, the Grass still miles away, the population
still hopeful of salvation. And then, because of the panic, the frantic
scurry to save things once valuable and now only valued, no one noticed
when a betraying wind blew seed