Part 75

“No other paper in town dares,” suggested the visitor insinuatingly.

“Makes it all the more news,” remarked Snyder. “What if we played it up for a big feature, eh?”

“Advertisers,” said the city editor significantly.

“Let ‘em drop out. They’ll come back quick enough, when we’ve shown up one or two and told why they quit us. And think of the splash we can make! Only paper in the city that dares tell the truth. We’ll rub that into our highly respectable rivals. I’ll make you a proposition,” he added, turning to his caller.

“Make it.”

“You know I’ve hammered at Tom Clyde pretty hard. I don’t cotton to that saintly, holier-than-thou reform bunch at all. Well, let Clyde come into the ‘Star’ with a signed statement as President of the Public Health League, and we’ll make it the basis of a campaign that will rip this town wide open for a couple of weeks. I’d like to see him in my paper, after all the roasting we’ve handed him.” And the malicious face wrinkled into another grin.

“You’ve bought a bargain,” stated Mrs. Sharpless. “The statement will be ready to-night. And another from Dr. Strong for good measure.”

“Fine business!” ejaculated the “Star’s” owner. “Not open to a reasonable offer in the newspaper game, are you?” he added, laughing. “No? Well, I’m sorry.”

“Would there be any use in my seeing the editors of the other papers?” asked Mrs. Sharpless.

“Watch them fall in line,” was the grim response. “Before we’ve been out a day, they’ll be tumbling over each other to make the dear, deluded public believe that they’re the real pioneers in saving the city from the deadly germ.”

“Well, here are my notes, if you can make anything out of them.”

“Eh? Notes?” said the newspaper man, who had been glancing at the sheets over Mrs. Sharp-less’s shoulder. “Oh—ah. Yes, of course. All right. Glad to have metcher,” he added, politely ushering her to the door. “I’ll send a reporter up for the statements at eight o’clock.”

“Thank you very much, Bartholomew Snyder,” said Grandma Sharpless, shaking hands.

“Not a bit of it! Thanks the other way. You’ve given me a good tip in my own game. Watch me—us—wake ‘em up to-morrow.”

Only the combined insistence of Grandma Sharpless and diplomacy of the Health Master overrode Mr. Clyde’s angry objections to “going into that filthy sheet” when the matter was broached to him that evening. For the good of the cause he finally acceded. And next morning the “Star” was a sight! It blazed in red captions. It squirmed and wriggled with illustrations of alleged germs. It shrieked in stentorian headlines. If the city had been beset by all the dogs of war, it couldn’t have blared more martial defiance against the enemy. It held its competitors up to infinite scorn and derision as mean-spirited shirks and cowards, and slathered itself with fulsome praises as the only original prop of truth and righteousness. And, as the centerpoint and core of all this, flaunted-the statement and signature of the Honorable Thomas Clyde, President of the Worthington Public Health League—with photograph. The face of Mr. Clyde, as he confronted this outrage upon his sensibilities at the breakfast table, was gloom itself until he turned to the editorial page. Then he emitted a whoop of glee. For there, double-leaded and double-headed was a Health Column, by “Our Special Writer, Grandma Sharpless, the Wisest Woman in Worthington. She will contribute opinions and advice on the epidemic to the ‘Star’ exclusively.” (Mr. Snyder had taken a chance with this latter statement.)

“Let me see,” gasped the old lady, when her son-in-law made known the cause of his mirth. Then, “They’ve published that stuff of mine just as I wrote it. I didn’t dream it was for print.”

“That’s what makes it so bully,” said the Health Master. “You’ve got the editorial trick of confidential, convincing, man-to-man talk down fine. What’s more, you’ll have to keep it up, now. Your friend, Snyder, has fairly caught you. Well, we need an official organ in the household.”

Vowing that she couldn’t and wouldn’t do it, nevertheless the new “editor” began to think of so many things that she wanted to say that, each day, when a messenger arrived from the “Star” with a polite request for “copy,” there was a telling column ready of the Health Master’s wisdom, simplified and pointed by Grandma Sharpless’s own pungent, crisp, vigorous, and homely style. Thanks largely to this, the “Star” became the mouthpiece of an anti-epidemic campaign which speedily enlisted the whole city.

But the “yellow” was not to have the field to itself. Once the cat was out of the bag, the other papers not only recognized it as a cat with great uproar, but, so to speak, proceeded to tie a can to its tail and pelt it through the streets of the city. As a matter of fact, no newspaper wishes to be hampered in the publishing of legitimate news; and it was only by the sternest threats of withdrawal of patronage that the large advertisers had hitherto succeeded in coercing the press of Worthington. Further coercion was useless, now that the facts had found their way into type. With great unanimity and an enthusiasm none the less genuine for having been repressed, the papers rushed into the breach. The “Clarion” organized an Anti-Infection League of School Children, with officers and banners. The “Press” “attended to” the recreant Dr. Mullins so fiercely that, notwithstanding his pull, he resigned his position in the Health Department because of “breakdown due to overwork in the course of his duties,” and ceased to trouble, in official circles. Enterprising reporters of the “Observer” caused the arrest of thirty-five trolley-car conductors for moistening transfers with a licked thumb, and then got the street-car company to issue a new form of transfer inscribed across the back, “Keep me away from your Mouth.” It fell to the “Evening News” to drive the common drinking-cup out of existence, after which it instituted reforms in soda fountains, restaurants, and barber shops, while the “Telegram” garnered great glory by interspersing the inning-by-inning returns of the baseball championship with bits of counsel as to how to avoid contagion in the theater, in the street, in travel, in banks, at home, and in various other walks of life. But the “Star” held foremost place, and clinched it with a Sunday “cut-out” to be worn as a badge, inscribed “Hands Off, Please, Until It’s Over.” All of which, while it sometimes verged upon the absurd, served the fundamentally valuable purpose of keeping the public in mind of the peril of contact with infected persons or articles.

Slowly but decisively the public absorbed the lesson. “Arm’s length” became a catch-phrase; a motto; a slogan. People came slowly to comprehend the methods by which disease is spread and the principles of self-protection.

And as knowledge widened, the epidemic ebbed, though gradually. Serious epidemics are not conquered or even perceptibly checked in a day. They are like floods; dam them in one place and they break through your defenses in another. Inexplicable outbreaks occur just when the tide seems to have turned. And when victory does come, it may not be ascribable to any specific achievement of the hygienic forces. The most that can be said is that the persevering combination of effort has at last made itself felt.

The red placards began to disappear; many of them, alas! only after the sable symbol of death had appeared beneath them. Dr. Strong and his worn-out aides found time to draw breath and reckon up their accounts in human life. The early mortality had been terrific. Of the cases which had developed in the period of suppression, before antitoxin was readily obtainable, more than a third had died.

“Nobody will ever be indicted for those murders,” said Dr. Strong to Mr. Clyde grimly. “But we have the satisfaction of knowing what can really be done by prompt work. Look at the figures after the free anti-toxin was established.”

There was a drop in the death rate, first to twenty per cent, then to ten, and, in the ebb stage of the scourge, to well below five.

“How many infections we’ve prevented by giving anti-toxin to immunize exposed persons, there’s no telling,” continued Dr. Strong. “That principle of starting a back-fire in diphtheria,—it’s exactly like starting a back-fire in a prairie conflagration,—by getting anti-toxin into the system in time to head off the poison of the disease itself, is one of the two or three great achievements of medical science. There isn’t an infected household in the city today, I believe, where this hasn’t been done. The end is in sight.”

“Then you can go away and get a few days’ rest,” said Grandma Sharpless, who constituted herself the Health Master’s own health guardian and undiplomaed medical adviser, and to whom he habitually rendered meek obedience; for she had been watching with anxiety the haggard lines in his face.

“Not yet,” he returned. “Measles we still have with us.”

“Decreasing, though,” said Mrs. Clyde. “Our nurses report a heavy drop in new cases and a big crop of convalescents.”