out his weekly paper, was lying on its side.
They had come to the newspaper office directly from their breakfast table, having been told of the break-in by City Marshal Tipton. More than a dozen citizens of the town had already been drawn to the scene of the crime by the time John and Millie arrived, and they were standing in a little cluster out on the boardwalk, just in front of the building.
The perpetrators had left a note:
“Who would do such a thing?” Millie asked between sobs.
“It’s fairly apparent, isn’t it?” John replied. “Denbigh did it.”
“We don’t know that,” Marshal Tipton said.
“The note doesn’t suggest that to you, Marshal?” John asked.
“Just the opposite,” Tipton said. “Denbigh is an educated man. Now, I’m not as smart as you are, but even I know how to spell the words come and damage.”
“I don’t mean Denbigh did it himself,” John said. “I mean he had it done.”
“Or maybe there are just some people in town who got upset with you because you’ve been coming down pretty hard on Denbigh in your stories. And Denbigh has done a lot of good for this town.”
“Really? What good has he done?”
“Let’s just say that he does a lot of business with the town.”
“Yes, by allowing only the businesses he wants to stay, and squeezing out the others. He’s killing this town, Marshal Tipton. And the people in town know it, only they are too frightened to do anything about it.”
“So you plan to mount a one-person campaign do you, Bryce?”
“If I am the only one willing to do anything about it, then yes, I will mount a one-person campaign.”
“Uh-huh,” Tipton said, stroking his jaw as he surveyed the shambles of the newspaper office. “And look what it got you.”
“It has set me back a bit, I’ll admit,” John said. “But it won’t stop me. It’ll take me a day to clean up. I’ll have the paper out this Thursday, just as I do every Thursday.”
“I’ll help you pick up all the type, Mr. Bryce,” a young boy of about twelve said.
“Thank you, Kenny.”
“I can go get Jimmy to help too, if you want me to.”
“That would be nice,” John said. He turned toward the group of people who were still standing just outside the office, and seeing Ernie West-pheling, called out to him.
“Ernie, would you help me set the printing press back up?”
“Sure thing,” Ernie said. Ernie, who had been a colonel during the Civil War, was now a local businessman who owned a gun store.
A couple of the other men also volunteered to help, and within a few minutes the printing press had been righted and was, once again, in its proper place. John surveyed it for a moment or two, then patted the press with a big smile.
“Not a scratch,” he said. “It takes more than a few of Denbigh’s hooligans to put ole George out of business.”
“George? I thought your name was John,” one of the men who had helped him, said.
“It is. George is the name of my printing press.”
“You’ve named your press?”
“Sure. It’s not only a part of this newspaper, it is the heart of the newspaper.”
“What are you going to do about your window?” Ernie asked.
“I’ll have to order a new glass from Bismarck,” John said. “In the meantime, I guess I’ll just board that side up.”
“What are you going to do about this, Marshal?” Ernie asked.
“I’ll look into it, see if I can find out who did it,” Tipton replied. “But if I don’t come up with any witnesses, I don’t know what I can do.”
“There has to be a witness somewhere,” Millie said. “It had to make a lot of noise when they broke out the window.”
“You live no more than a couple of blocks from here, Mrs. Bryce. Did you hear anything?” Tipton asked.
“No.”
“And the newspaper belongs to you and your husband, so you would be even more attentive, I would think. You heard nothing, but you expect others in the town did?” Tipton shook his head. “No, ma’am, I don’t expect I’m going to find anything.”
“That’s because you aren’t looking in the right place,” John said. “You and I both know who is behind
