“We’ve got to, Molly,” MacVeagh had insisted. “There’s so much we can do for Grover. If we can settle the troubles at Hitchcock, that’s just a start. We can make this over into the finest community in the country. And we haven’t space in one small weekly edition. With a daily we can do things gradually, step by step . . .”
“And what, boss, do we use for money? That’ll mean more presses, more men, more paper. Where’s the money coming from?”
“That,” said John MacVeagh, “I don’t know.”
And he never did. There was simply a small statement in the paper:
ANONYMOUS
BENEFACTOR
ENDOWS SENTINEL
Mr. Manson was never able to find a teller who remembered receiving that astonishingly large deposit made to the credit of the Sentinel’s account; but there it was, all duly entered.
And so the Grover Sentinel became a daily, printing the truth.
V
If it’s all right with you, we’ll skip pretty fast over the next part of the story. The days of triumph never make interesting reading. The rise and fall—that’s your dramatic formula. The build-up can be stirring and the letdown can be tragic, but there’s no interest in the flat plateau at the top.
So there’s no need to tell in detail all that happened in Grover after the Sentinel went daily. You can imagine the sort of thing: How the Hitchcock plant stepped up its production and turned out a steady flow of war materiel that was the pride of the county, the state, and even the country. How Doc Quillan tracked down, identified, and averted the epidemic that threatened the workers’ housing project. How Chief Hanby finally got the goods on the gamblers who were moving in on the South Side and cleaned up the district. How the Grover Red Cross drive went a hundred percent over its quota. How the expected meat shortage never materialized . . . You get the picture.
All this is just the plateau, the level stretch between the rise and the fall. Not that John MacVeagh expected the fall. Nothing like that seemed possible, even though Molly worried.
“You know, boss,” she said one day, “I was reading over some of the books I used to love when I was a kid. This wish—it’s magic, isn’t it?”
MacVeagh snapped the speaking box on his desk and gave a succinct order to the assistant editor. He was the chief executive of a staff now. Then he turned back and said, “Why, yes, Molly, I guess you might call it that. Magic, miracle—what do we care so long as it enables us to accomplish all we’re doing?”
“I don’t know. But sometimes I get scared. Those books, especially the ones by E. Nesbit—”
MacVeagh grinned. “Scared of kids’ books?”
“I know it sounds silly, boss, but kids’ books are the only place you can find out about magic. And there seems to be only one sure thing about it: You can know there’s a catch to it. There’s always a catch.”
MacVeagh didn’t think any further about that. What stuck in his mind were phrases like those he heard down at Clem’s barber shop:
“Hanged if I know what’s come over this burg. Seems like for a couple of months there just can’t nothing go wrong. Ever since that trouble out at the plant when they got rid of Bricker, this burg is just about perfect, seems like.”
Those were fine words. They fed the soul. They made you forget that little, nagging, undefined discontent that was rankling underneath and threatening to spoil all this wonderful miracle—or magic, if you prefer. They even made you be polite to H. A. Hitchcock when he came to pay his respects to you after the opening of the new Sentinel Building.
He praised MacVeagh as an outstanding example of free enterprise. (A year or so ago he would have said rugged individualism, but the phrase had been replaced in his vocabulary by its more noble-sounding synonym.) He probed with man-to-man frankness trying to learn where the financial backing had come from. He all but apologized for the foolish misunderstanding over the butler’s crime. And he ended up with a dinner invitation in token of reconciliation.
MacVeagh accepted. But his feelings were mixed, and they were even more mixed when he dropped into the office on the night of the dinner, resplendent in white tie and tails, to check up some last-minute details on the reports of the election for councilman. He had just learned that Grizzle had had some nasty semi-Fascist tieups a year earlier, and must not be allowed to be elected.
“I don’t know what’s the matter,” he confided to Molly after he’d attended to business. “I ought to be sitting on top of the world, and somehow I’m not. Maybe I almost see what the trouble is: No heavy.”
“What does that mean, boss?”
“No opposition. Nothing to fight against. Just wield my white magic benevolently and that’s that. I need a black magician to combat me on my own level. You’ve got to have a heavy.”
“Are you so sure,” Molly asked, “that yours is white magic?”
“Why—”
“Skip it, boss. But I think I know one thing that’s the matter. And I think, God help me, that you’ll realize it tonight.”
Molly’s words couldn’t have been truer if she had printed them in the Sentinel.
The party itself was painful. Not the dinner; that was as admirable as only H. A. Hitchcock’s chef could contrive. But the company had been carefully chosen to give MacVeagh the idea that, now that he was making such a phenomenal success of himself, he was to be welcomed among the Best People of Grover.
There were the Mansons, of course, and Phil Rogers, and Major General Front, U.S.A., retired, and a half dozen others who formed a neat tight little society of mutual admiration and congratulation. The only halfway human person present seemed to be the new general manager of the plant, Johansen; but he sat
