Directly after the apotheosis of Merle his brother had been taken to the Advance office where, perched upon a high stool, his bare legs intricately entwined among its rungs, he had been taught the surface mysteries of typesetting.  At first he was merely let to set up quads in his stick, though putting leads between the lines and learning the use of his steel rule.  Then he was taught the location of the boxes in the case and was allowed to set real type.  By the time Sam Pickering noted the moving signs in Dave the boy was struggling with copy and winning his father’s praise for his aptitude.  True, he too often neglected to reach to the upper case for capital letters, and the galley proofs of his takes were not as clean as they should have been, but he was learning.  His father said so.

Every Wednesday he earned a real quarter by sitting against the wall back of the hand press and inking the forms while his father ran off the edition.  This was better fun than typesetting.  Before you was a long roller on two other long rollers, and at your right hand was a small roller with which you picked up ink from a stone, rolling it across and across with a spirited crackle; then you ran the small roller the length of the long roller; then you turned a crank that revolved the two lower rollers, thus distributing the ink evenly over the upper one.  After that you ran the upper roller out over the two forms of type on the press bed.

Dave Cowan, across the press, the sleeves of his pink-striped shirt rolled to his elbows, then let down a frame in which he had fixed a virgin sheet of paper, ran the bed of the press back under a weighted shelf, and pulled a mighty lever to make the imprint.  Wilbur had heard the phrase “power of the press.”  He conceived that this was what the phrase meant—­this pulling of the lever.  Surmounting the framework of the press was a bronze eagle with wings out-spread for flight.  His father told him, the first day of his service, that this bird would flap its wings and scream three times when the last paper was run off.  This would be the signal for Terry Stamper, the devil, to go across to Vielhaber’s and fetch a pail of beer.  Wilbur had waited for this phenomenon, only to believe, after repeated disappointments, that it was one of his father’s jokes, though it was true that Terry Stamper brought the beer, which was drunk by Dave and Terry and Sam Pickering.  Sam had been folding the printed papers, while Terry Stamper operated a machine that left upon each the name of a subscriber, dropping them into a clothes basket, which he later conveyed to the post office.  Wilbur enjoyed this work, running the long roller across the forms after each impression, spotting himself and his clothes with ink.  After he had learned some more he would be a printer’s devil like Terry, and fetch the beer and run the job press and do other interesting things.  There was a little thrill for him in knowing you could say devil in this connection without having people think you were using a bad word.