Sweet Thunder by Ivan Doig Read Free Book Online Page A

crowd stood out for exactly what he was, a hunch-shouldered pallid type, stone bald, as emblematic of the newspapering profession as a wooden Indian is of a cigar store. This was none other than Armbrister, Jared’s choice of editor.
    While Jared with Rab attached was going around the room making introductions, the sallow journalist and I singled ourselves out as if by instinct. Shaking hands at a careful distance, we studied each other. Armbrister wore a trademark green eyeshade and the expression of a hound dog on a cold trail. From the look of him, he had worn both since time immemorial. He eyed my rather smart tweed suit—London; those tailors—none too neutrally.
    â€œYou know beans about newspapering, Morgan?”
    â€œA bit, from a lifetime of reading every scrap of newsprint possible. Do you know beans about arousing public opinion for a good cause?”
    â€œI’ve heard distant rumors of it,” he answered lugubriously, “about like the existence of the unicorn.”
    â€œMmm. I understand that up until now you worked for our rival, the
Post
.”
    â€œCity editor on that rag, was all,” he snapped, giving me a look I thought of as the Butte eye. It was not a true squint, simply a slight lowering of the eyelids like a camera aperture finding finer focus. I had encountered it at Dublin Gulch wakes, and in a mineshaft nearly a mile deep in the Hill, and on occasion in the woman at my side in life, Butte-born as Grace was. That particular cast of eye perhaps became habitual in a city always enwrapped in conflict. Armbrister maintained it as he grudgingly spoke the next: “I didn’t have to run up to the top floor of the Hennessy Building like a coolie and have every word pass inspection with the bastards there, if that’s what you’re thinking.” At the mention of Anaconda’s lair on high, his long face grew longer. “A man has to make a living, you know.”
    â€œI do know.”
    Something in the way I said that drew the first twinge of interest from the hound dog face. “Evans swears you’re a pip at making the language dance.” He sniffed. “Naturally, any paper worth its ink needs a Fancy Dan for its editorial page or readers will never get past the funnies.”
    â€œAnd naturally, you are the crusading editor leading the charge and I am the, ah, working stiff.”
    He gave me another looking-over to see if I meant that, and by some intuition must have decided I deserved the benefit of the doubt, at least temporarily.
    â€œHell, man,” he rasped, “maybe we’re a pair of a kind, jokers wild. We’ll see.”
    I nodded at the eyeshade of green celluloid, prominent as the visor on the helmet of a knight. “I don’t mean to be impertinent, but I thought only editors like the one in
Barnaby of Drudge Street
wore one.”
    That brought a laugh like a bark. “Buster, if I didn’t wear this for reading copy under every kind of light except Jesus’ halo, I’d be one of the blind cases selling papers on the street instead of editing one. You a bookworm, then?”
    I confessed I was.
    â€œDamn good thing,” he surprised me. “An editorial writer needs all the ammo there is.”
    Having observed our colloquy, Jared came over and said it looked to him like we maybe could stand to be in the same office with each other. “So far so good, in getting things set up,” he rubbed his hands in satisfaction as the news staff shoved desks into arrangement as decreed by Armbrister, and the compositors and pressmen trooped off to ready their work sphere in the rear of the building. Armbrister’s lair, besides a strategic desk in the middle of the newsroom, turned out to be a tightly glassed-in cubicle that likely had been the instructor’s refuge of quiet when the typing school was going full blast. Rab joined us in there, saying brightly, “I have a question for you