JOURNALISM AT TUCKER'S GULCH.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 6126, 12 March 1898, Page 6

JOURNALISM AT TUCKER'S GULCH.

— . — (Harper. Jlfaga-tii... } In the early days- of the gold excitement in the Black ___s,J was at Tucker's Gulch, working in the Daily Prospector office. Henry M'Nabb was the editor. He was a little sawed-off sample of humanity, some five feet high, and weighing about a hundred and ten pounds. By some congenital misdeal, however, he had got, in the matter of combativeness, the disposition of a man twice as high and weighing seven or eight hundred pounds. Asa-con-sequence, he was always in hot water, though, to do him justice, on the-occasion j I have in mind it was not the fault of his | Ir^PPery temper— and the pepper thereof was of exceeding redness — which brought about the trouble, but circumstances- over which he had no-control. 1 The disproportion in Mr M'Nabb's size ; and temper rendered it necessary to keep a fighting editor on the staff, and I being a nian of peace, inclined not-only to turn the other cheek, but also to point out its-ad-vantages^ for smiting purposes, this important .position was held by a printer nampd Snort — Reuben Snort—at least, that is what he said his name was, and nobody felt disposed to question it. Rouben was large and square-cornered, with craggy and beetKng outlines, a jutting lower jaw, and a sheer height of some six feet two inches. His head was round, and evidently of granite formation, and covered with a ' heavy growth of brindled hair. His nose, had been broken in some cataclysm - of the remote past, and his ears had also - suffered. Take him all in all, he was of a stern and forbidding aspect, and reminded the beholder of some of the wilder scenery along the Grand Canyon of the Colorado . in Arizona. , . As Snort never wrote anything ..for the paper, the. entire editorial work fell on M'Nabb. He used to turn out two to three columns a day, which we set up and printed off. But bef-re I speak further I must refer to a difficulty undfer which the office laboured. • This was lack of " sorts " in the type. Capital W's and ' H's would run short nearly every ' day, while lower-case n's, s's, and some other letters would frequently fail us. M'Nabb came to show great ingenuity in avoiding the use of the letters in which there was a deficiency. Thus he would speak of the "great and glorious capital city of this nation," instead of referring to it simply as Washington, when we reported a growing scarcity of W's. M'Nabb could easily have replenished' •the type with the necessary sorts, but he never did. No bad results of the lack were ever experienced till on the occasion of a visit to town fronvMr William Brower. Mr Brower was a large, quarrelsome man, given to liquor. About once a month he would come down from Double Eagle Canyon and spend a loud and hilarious week in town, if not sooner crippled by a well-aimed bullet, or chased out by a sheriffs posse. M'Nabb never had any' trouble with him. Indeed, he rather welcomed his visits, as they were sure to be productive of local news. Too frequently this news occupied the obituary column. But this gave M'Nabb no concern, as he was rather strong on obituaries, and they filled up as much as anything. In fact, M'Nabb kept a supply of obituaries of prominent citizens constantly on hand in an envelope labelled "fillers," and these were slapped into the paper in case of an emergency, sometimes before the deceased was dead. It happened on the occasion of one of Brower's periodical incursions that we ran short of capital B's. Usually these held out pretty well, but there was a long reading notice of a coming circus tbat day, and they always eat up capitals in a surprising manner. There were lines about the "Bounding Beasts of the Jungle," the "Biggest Show ever Brought to this Country," the " Bow-backed Behemoth of the Bottomless Bog," the "Conglomeration of Living and Breathing Wonders Bought with the Sacrifice of Billows of Blood and Billions of Bullion," and so forth. Along in the afternoon M'Nabb saw Brower, and came in and wrote a personal about him. When I took it off the copyhook and saw that it called for capital Bs, being anxious to avoid all misunderstandings where Brower was concerned, I said to M'Nabb— "The cap Bs are all out. Cant we get around these somehow ?" " Like toknow how you'd do it ?" he said, with a scowl, glancing over the copy, and shaking his head discouragingly. "Yo* "light say that the first citizen of Double Eagle Canyon is observed on our streets," and so forth, I suggested meekly, after a moment's reflection. " Every man in Double. Eagle Canyon is the first citizen," snapped M'Nabb, scornfully, as much as to say my editorial sagacity was beneath contempt. " Then we might pull some of the cap Bs in the circus notice, and substitute lower-case ?" I suggested. "Can't afford to offend an advertiser these hard times. Put it as usual when we're short of a capital," retorted M'Nabb, turning away from me, and thereby closing the debate. I went back to the case, and the next

< morning this item came out in the Prospector: — "We noticed the genial bill brower, oi Double Eagle Canyon, in our midst yester day. He is a whole-souled man, and will stay a week." It was about two o'clock that afternoon when I heard heavy stops on the outside : stairs .and suspected that Brower was coming. I was setting up one of M'Nabb's i editorials on "The Orderly Character of Tucker's Gulch," -when the door opened, I and I saw that my suspicions had been j well founded. Bill Brower -towered before 1 us. His genial eye was of tho colour of [ an autumn sunset, and the flavour of his j breath filled the office like an in-rolling , fog. He stepped to M'Nabb, carrying a copy of the paper with an unsteady finger on the offensive item, and said : — "See here, you insect; what you using them there ornery little bs fer, when you mention a gentleman inthis yere shot-gun wad of yourn ?" M'Nabb kept on writing, and never looked up. "We used those because wedidn't have any smaller ones," he replied, calmly, after a pause that seemed an eternity. The whole-souled Brower drew back in astonishment, then he dashed the paper on the floor and said :~- --"Do you know *£raifc I'm going to do to a reptile about your size ! ? I'm going to take him up and carry him out, and pound the surface of the /earth with him ! I'm going to wear out the main street of the town with him! It's going to take the path-master two days. to repair the road after I get done with him !" He stepped towards M'Nabb, who simply remarked, as he scratched away, " Reub !" ia a gentle half -reproving tone. This individual laid down his composing-stick, and strode over like the shadow of a great storm advancing across the desert. He seized the dissatisfied visitor by the collar and drew him back. The struggle which followed was titanic. The firstthing which was overturned was the stove. Next the job-press went, then a 50lb keg of black news ink. M'Nabb never looked up from bis desk. I found afterwards that he was writing an article on " The Advantages in Our Midst. Offered to a Good Class of Settlers." Part of the time the two men weredownonthefloorrollingintheink. The uproar was something deafening. I kept up my . work on the "The Orderly Character of Tucker's Gulch," as much as possible, but I could not resist the temptation to watch the struggle out of the corner of ray eye. The terms those two men applied; to each other, when they, could catch enough breath for it, were something shocking to hear. There was no mincing matters — each let the other know just what he thought of him. Once the -rißi__iffea_ thquake was usingthe mallet to pound the head of the resident tornado, who responded with a brass-lined galley, but neither seemed to make any impression on the -unyielding countenance of the other. After a time, Reuben got some sort of a purchase on his antagonist, and pushed him through the light pine "floor, smashing it utterly. I heard them struggling on the landing at the head of the stairs- outside, then suddenly there was a series of thumps which shoot the building. M'Nabb casually tucked his pen behind his ear, gathered up the loose leaves of his manuscript, and said — " Something seems to be falling yearthward." Just then Reub oame in, and went back to his case, carelessly, as if he had been out to mail a letter. "Do we need to use cap B'-s for bim p" asked M'Nabb. "It ain't necessary," answered Reub. SfNabb scratched off an item, and this is the wayit appeared next morning :-— " bill brower, of Double Eaglo Canyon, '_ made us a pleasant call yesterday, bill j brower is one of nature's noblemen, a good j : neighbour, and a jovial companion. Drop * in again, billy, when fyou have time to j make a longer stay." j And as long as I was there M'Nabb never < i got any more type; but though we-chroni-cled the movements of the gentleman from Double Eagle Canyon always with small i bs, no matter how many large ones there i were,. he never came in to sac us abont it I again. .