“We’ll put this in red!  God!  The Senator is an artist!  I like having to lick the hand that leashes me.”

“And feeds you, eh?” added Bat.

Beneath the flare heading followed a statement of facts (more or less) to the effect that in an altercation between the drovers of some outside cattlemen and the herders belonging to the MacDonald ranch, the sheep herd had been hustled—­("I like your alliterations, Bat, it gives flavor of quality,” commented the news-man with a snap of his black eyes,) too close to the edge of the Rim Rocks with the unintended and tragical result that several hundred sheep had been shoved over the battlements. ("What I like specially is what you don’t give,” commented the news-man.)

There was not a word about broken backs and slashed lambs and disemboweled ewes; nor of what had been found on the Upper Mesas.  As a sort of addendum it was stated that a boy belonging to the Mission school had lost his life in the melee.

“Anyway, we’re in style!  Way to tell a thing now adays is to turn all around it, and not tell anything at all.  Auto suggestion, eh, Bat?”

Bat’s fat cheeks blew up in the explosion of a bursting paper bag.  “You bet it’s auto all right.  If you’d heard the old man talking all the way down on the iniquity of the thing:  he kept it going harder than the buzz wagon.”

“Better inform a breathlessly eager public that he’s gone to Washington?”

“Here, I’ve got that, too!  He dictated that straight, ’for the express purpose of taking up the whole question of eliminating the grazing areas from the National Forests when it will be possible for the State authorities to protect the live stock interests,’” Bat handed across the second item.

“What in thunder have the National Forests to do with the Rim Rock massacre?” The newsman looked up through his glasses.

“And who in thunder is going to ask that?”

Bat tapped the last item sharply with his pencil.  “They’ll read that and they’ll read the other, and I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts nine men out of ten will begin jawing and spouting and arguing that if there were no National Forests, there would be no Range Wars.  If they draw a false impression, that’s the public’s look out.  If we weren’t dealing with damphools, we couldn’t fool ’em.”

“But it didn’t happen on the National Forests.”

“But it’s only the tenth man who will stop to think that out.  You put in one of those big middle page cartoons—­National Forests with the Federal sign board, KEEP OFF, the sheep being massacred inside the sign board and the State sheriff unable to go in and stop it—­”

“But you didn’t say massacred!  You said they accidently went over the edge.”

“But it’s only the tenth man will stop to think that.  You run the cartoon, see?” said Bat, and, though he asked it as a question, if sounded final.  The news-man went tearing back to the front editorial rooms.  Bat went whistling down stairs, two steps at a bounce.  At the half-way landing, he paused.