Before the train stopped at Fraserville he saw from the car window the name “Bassett” written large on a towering elevator,—­a fact which he noted carefully as offering a suggestion for the introductory line of his sketch.  As he left the station and struck off toward the heart of the town, he was aware that Bassett was a name that appealed to the eye frequently.  The Bassett Block and Bassett’s Bank spoke not merely for a material prosperity, rare among the local statesmen he had described in the “Courier,” but, judging from the prominence of the name in Fraserville nomenclature, he assumed that it had long been established in the community.  Harwood had not previously faced a second generation in his pursuit of Hoosier celebrities, and he breathed a sigh of relief at the prospect of a variation on the threadbare scenario of early hardship, the little red schoolhouse, patient industry, and the laborious attainment of meagre political honors—­which had begun to bore him.

Harwood sought first the editor of the “Fraser County Democrat,” who was also the “Courier’s” Fraserville correspondent.  Fraserville boasted two other newspapers, the “Republican,” which offset the “Democrat” politically, and the “News,” an independent afternoon daily whose function was to encourage strife between its weekly contemporaries and boom the commercial interests of the town.  The editor of the “Democrat” was an extremely stout person, who sprawled at ease in a battered swivel chair, with his slippered feet thrown across a desk littered with newspapers, clippings, letters, and manuscript.  A file hook was suspended on the wall over his shoulder, and on this it was his habit to impale, by a remarkable twist of body and arm, gems for his hebdomadal journal.  He wrote on a pad held in his ample lap, the paste brush was within easy reach, and once planted on his throne the editor was established for the day.  Bound volumes of the “Congressional Record” in their original wrappers were piled in a corner.  A consular report, folded in half, was thrust under the editor’s right thigh, easly accessible in ferocious moments when he indulged himself in the felicity of slaughtering the roaches with which the place swarmed.  He gave Dan a limp fat hand, and cleared a chair of exchanges with one foot, which he thereupon laboriously restored to its accustomed place on the desk.

“So you’re from the ‘Courier’?  Well, sir, you may tell your managing editor for me that if he doesn’t print more of my stuff he can get somebody else on the job here.”

Dan soothed Mr. Pettit’s feelings as best he could; he confessed that his own best work was mercilessly cut; and that, after all, the editors of city newspapers were poor judges of the essential character of news.  When Pettit’s good humor had been restored, Dan broached the nature of his errand.  As he mentioned Morton Bassett’s name the huge editor’s face grew blank for a moment; then he was shaken with mirth that passed from faint quivers until his whole frame was convulsed.  His rickety chair trembled and rattled ominously.  It was noiseless laughter so far as any vocal manifestations were concerned; but it shook the gigantic editor as though he were a mould of jelly.  He closed his eyes, but otherwise his fat face was expressionless.