“I don’t think I understand you,” said the editor loftily, but with an inward misgiving.  “You don’t mean to say that a regular, actual advertisement”—­

“Of course, I know all that,” said the foreman, with a peculiar smile; “and I’m ready to back you up in it, and so’s the boy; but it won’t pay.”

“It has paid a hundred and five dollars,” said the editor, taking the notes from his pocket; “so I’d advise you to simply attend to your duty and set it up.”

A look of surprise, followed, however, by a kind of pitying smile, passed over the foreman’s face.  “Of course, sir, that’s all right, and you know your own business; but if you think that the new advertisement will pay this time as the other one did, and whoop up another column from an advertiser, I’m afraid you’ll slip up.  It’s a little ‘off color’ now,—­not ’up to date,’—­if it ain’t a regular ‘back number,’ as you’ll see.”

“Meantime I’ll dispense with your advice,” said the editor curtly, “and I think you had better let our subscribers and advertisers do the same, or the ‘Clarion’ might also be obliged to dispense with your services.”

“I ain’t no blab,” said the foreman, in an aggrieved manner, “and I don’t intend to give the show away even if it don’t pay.  But I thought I’d tell you, because I know the folks round here better than you do.”

He was right.  No sooner had the advertisement appeared than the editor found that everybody believed it to be a sheer invention of his own to “once more boom” the “Clarion.”  If they had doubted Mr. Dimmidge, they utterly rejected Mrs. Dimmidge as an advertiser!  It was a stale joke that nobody would follow up; and on the heels of this came a letter from the editor-in-chief.

My dear boy,—­You meant well, I know, but the second Dimmidge “ad” was a mistake.  Still, it was a big bluff of yours to show the money, and I send you back your hundred dollars, hoping you won’t “do it again.”  Of course you’ll have to keep the advertisement in the paper for two issues, just as if it were a real thing, and it’s lucky that there’s just now no pressure in our columns.  You might have told a better story than that hogwash about your finding the “ad” and a hundred dollars lying loose on your desk one morning.  It was rather thin, and I don’t wonder the foreman kicked.

The young editor was in despair.  At first he thought of writing to Mrs. Dimmidge at the Elktown Post-Office, asking her to relieve him of his vow of secrecy; but his pride forbade.  There was a humorous concern, not without a touch of pity, in the faces of his contributors as he passed; a few affected to believe in the new advertisement, and asked him vague, perfunctory questions about it.  His position was trying, and he was not sorry when the term of his engagement expired the next week, and he left Calaveras to take his new position on the San Francisco paper.