CHAPTER X
In the wide stretches of a new country there is nothing
to bound a local excitement, or to impede its transmission
at full value. Elgin was a manufacturing town in southern
Ontario, but they would have known every development of
the Federal Bank case at the North Pole if there had been
anybody there to learn. In Halifax they did know it, and
in Vancouver, B.C., while every hundred miles nearer it
warmed as a topic in proportion. In Montreal the papers
gave it headlines; from Toronto they sent special reporters.
Of course, it was most of all the opportunity of Mr Horace
Williams, of the Elgin Express, and of Rawlins, who held
all the cards in their hands, and played them, it must
be said, admirably, reducing the Mercury to all sorts of
futile expedients to score, which the Express would
invariably explode with a guffaw of contradiction the
following day. It was to the Express that the Toronto
reporters came for details and local colour; and Mr
Williams gave them just as much as he thought they ought
to have and no more. It was the Express that managed,
while elaborately abstaining from improper comment upon
a matter sub judice, to feed and support the general
conviction of young Ormiston's innocence, and thereby
win for itself, though a "Grit" paper, wide reading in
that hotbed of Toryism, Moneida Reservation, while the
Conservative Mercury, with its reckless sympathy for an
old party name, made itself criminally liable by reviewing
cases of hard dealing by the bank among the farmers, and
only escaped prosecution by the amplest retraction and
the most contrite apology.
Pages:
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129