The two directors learnt that the delicate threat had been uttered by four Signal boys, who had objected to any fellow-boys offering any paper other than the Signal for sale in Crown Square or anywhere else.

Of course, it was absurd.

Still, absurd as it was, it continued.  The central publishing offices of the Daily at Hanbridge, and its branch offices in the neighbouring towns, were like military hospitals, and the truth appeared to the directors that while the public was panting to buy copies of the Daily, the sale of the Daily was being prevented by means of a scandalous conspiracy on the part of Signal boys.  For it must be understood that in the Five Towns people prefer to catch their newspaper in the street as it flies and cries.  The Signal had a vast army of boys, to whom every year it gave a great fete.  Indeed, the Signal possessed nearly all the available boys, and assuredly all the most pugilistic and strongest boys.  Mr Myson had obtained boys only after persistent inquiry and demand, and such as he had found were not the fittest, and therefore were unlikely to survive.  You would have supposed that in a district that never ceases to grumble about bad trade and unemployment, thousands of boys would have been delighted to buy the Daily at fourpence a dozen and sell it at sixpence.  But it was not so.

On the second day the dearth of boys at the offices of the Daily was painful.  There was that magnificent, enterprising newspaper waiting to be sold, and there was the great enlightened public waiting to buy; and scarcely any business could be done because the Signal boys had established a reign of terror over their puny and upstart rivals!

The situation was unthinkable.

Still, unthinkable as it was, it continued.  Mr Myson had thought of everything except this.  Naturally it had not occurred to him that an immense and serious effort for the general weal was going to be blocked by a gang of tatterdemalions.

He complained with dignity to the Signal, and was informed with dignity by the Signal that the Signal could not be responsible for the playful antics of its boys in the streets; that, in short, the Five Towns was a free country.  In the latter proposition Mr Myson did not concur.

After trouble in the persuasion of parents—­astonishing how indifferent the Five Towns’ parent was to the loss of blood by his offspring!—­a case reached the police-court.  At the hearing the Signal gave a solicitor a watching brief, and that solicitor expressed the Signal’s horror of carnage.  The evidence was excessively contradictory, and the Stipendiary dismissed the summons with a good joke.  The sole definite result was that the boy whose father had ostensibly brought the summons, got his ear torn within a quarter of an hour of leaving the court.  Boys will be boys.