He was but secondary indeed in Ned's consideration. Ned did not even ask what transpired in the visits which he knew the galley-boys and printer-cubs made to the Bateman shop, when they returned, without news indeed, but munching their purchases from paper bags with the name of the elder Bateman printed thereon. Why should they go? What discovery could the elder printers anticipate in sending them on these bootless errands? The attitude of mind of the printers seemed to him the more formidable because he knew it was shared in the editorial rooms, where, however, all its manifestations were carefully cloaked from him. Yet he often noted indicia which convinced him that the suspicions of the editorial force were by no means allayed. He could not divine these suspicions nor whom they concerned. He grew more alarmed, and a conversation which chanced to come to his ears one day occasioned him much troubled meditation.
He was going into the "rinktum" of the editor-in-chief for copy. The door stood slightly ajar. He made no noise and for some moments his entrance was unnoticed. The crack reporter of the paper in a mysterious undertone was detailing something about the burned theatre to the editor-in-chief. There were present other editors of the various departments. Their faces all wore that excited, absorbed look which Ned had noticed whenever the name of Gorham was mentioned. One hasty scribe, in leaving off writing to come to listen, had thrust his pen behind his ear with an eager awkwardness that left a smear upward from the eyebrow and gave him an unwonted Mephistophelian aspect.
"Gorham says he is not going to rebuild his theatre," continued the reporter.
The ensuing silence had all the effect of an interrogation point.
"Says he is going to build stores only, strictly commercial purposes," pursued the interviewer.
There was a murmur of surprise, which could not, however, be construed as an interruption.
"He said he had concluded to go out of the theatrical business,—he had got sick of it; I asked why, and—and"—The young man broke into a laugh of mingled scorn and enjoyment. It was expressive, but clogged utterance.
"Why?" demanded the coterie in chorus.
"His mother was a Methodist," exclaimed the young sprig with another burst of hilarity.
A moment of dumb amazement.
"Has he just found that out?" asked the editor at last.
The writer who had smeared his face with ink accented its effect with a sneer. "Just found it out when he has gotten rid of a ruinous piece of property, converted into a splendid commercial building site, and with his pockets full of spot cash, his insurance."
"Ah, but his pockets are not full of cash," said the interviewer. "I was just coming to that. The insurance companies haven't as yet ponied up. They have paid nothing. They seem 'rather slow,' he said. He supposes there must be 'a little hitch' somewhere,—it is a large sum with each company,—but he expects it presently. That is what he said. Upon my word I can't make him out. He told it all as innocently as a baby."
Ned could not make them out. He hardly felt that he understood the language in which they spoke, so little meaning did their words convey to him. He puzzled over this conversation often, but without result.
He encountered this spirit even at the foreman's house, where formerly he had loved to go. When he had first been employed at the office the foreman had chanced to send him to his dwelling for some forgotten article, and Bob Platt, who was a breezy, jovial soul and keenly relished a jest or quip with scant regard to its point or quality, if but it was merry, found much enjoyment in the account which he received of the country child's first encounter with a parrot, an honored member of the Platt household. Thereafter he encouraged Ned's presence there that he might himself have a laugh at the boy's overpowering astonishment at the loquacious accomplishments of the bird and his simple-minded horror of its profanity.
"You see I ought to have sent it to Sunday-school when it was young!" Bob Platt seriously explained, and the new importation from the backwoods believed this at the time, as he would then have believed anything that Bob Platt chose to tell him, especially about thatlusus naturæ, a bird that could talk and swear!
Later he came to know Bob Platt as "a mighty kind man, but will have his joke!" This just appraisement was brought about chiefly through Mrs. Platt's interference to prevent the devil from being "bedeviled" beyond the point of comfort and good-nature. She would not permit his mystification about city ways and his implicit reliance on the gay fables invented by Bob Platt, which Ned would have accepted as if they were gospel truth.
"Don't let him humbug you, Eddy!" she would interrupt warningly, at the very crisis of the fun.
For Bob Platt was by no means "boss" at home! His ascendency ceased at the threshold of the composing-room. Mrs. Platt gave Ned good, sound information and admonition to counteract the wondrous stories of the foreman, which the credulous boy was prepared to swallow whole coming from that source, so great was his confidence in Bob Platt, and to say truth his serious-minded wife spoiled many a good and harmless joke.
Mrs. Platt gradually became a genuine partisan of the lad. His kindly disposition was early appreciated by her. Indeed, only the day after he had first been sent there he had stopped on his way down town, for her neat home lay in a quiet cul-de-sac, with half a dozen other pretty cottages, opening off a genteel street between the dreary tenement region where he lived and the business portion of the city. After a neighborly country fashion he wanted to know if she had any "yerrands" which he might do for her on his way back, "bein' as you ain't got no boys, an' nothin' but girls," he explained sympathetically and with an expression of genuine pity.
Despite her intolerance of jokes at his expense Mrs. Platt thought his commiseration very funny, but she had her own reasons to feel deeply the lad's simple effort at courtesy and proffer of kind offices. Her heart was the more tender in the knowledge that she had not long to live. A persistent bronchial affection, with which she had warred for years, which had kept them poor, devouring money and care and time like some veritable monster, had, still unappeased, developed into consumption, now so unmistakable that even Bob Platt's laugh was often petrified on his jovial face by the perception of the fierce and ghastly fate that stood awaiting his household in the near future. She accepted Ned's politeness in the spirit in which it had been offered, and sometimes made him proud and pleased in executing some trifling commission. He came at last to be more genuinely useful, and often was intrusted with the escort of the four small girls of the family to the Sunday-school; and by this means Mrs. Platt got in some missionary work, for at that Sunday-school Ned heard of many comfortable things his spirit had not known before.
The four Platt girls had also some secular pleasures in which he participated, and the chief of these was called by them "viewin' the percession!" Never was there a muster of militia or a parade of firemen or a wonderful exhibition of bicyclists through the streets that they were not present to see. Whenever the exaction of the payment of some grotesque election bet set the community agog over the spectacle of one commercial magnate propelling another in a wheelbarrow through the principal thoroughfares, preceded by a band of music, and with all the teeth of the town a-grin in evidence of relish, the keenest cackle of callow laughter came from the four Platts and their attendant printer's devil. Never a circus tent was pitched and the elephant made the tour of the town that Ned, with each hand held tight by the smaller girls while the two elder followed close behind within clutch of his protective jacket, did not hie himself with his charges to some coigne of vantage particularly adapted to joyously see all that there was to be seen. It was always Mrs. Platt who thanked the boy, but it was Bob who owed him special gratitude on these occasions, for but for this substitute he must needs have played squire of dames himself, for the Platt girls would take no denial, and their father had long ago lost a living interest in elephants.
Nowadays, however, Ned was aware that it was Bob Platt himself who took special note of him whenever he chanced to appear at the house, far more rarely though it was than heretofore; for the boy was both proud and sensitive, and he feared lest some allusion to his arrest and that terrible day behind the bars escape these friends of happier times.
"I want to set Ned to talking," Platt would urge when his wife would object to his interference with the lad.
"No! you get no 'scoops' here!" she would declare. For she believed that Bob Platt would not spare his grandmother had the ancient dame been capable of furnishing the paper with a genuine "scoop."
She had herself earnestly remonstrated with Ned and urged him to make a clean breast of the whole affair, and she believed faithfully that the boy had been terrorized into silence rather than was guilty of crime. When he resisted her arguments by simply maintaining a dumb persistence, she felt it was the part of wisdom to torment him no more. "Give him a chance to recover his spirits and his confidence in people! His whole life is at stake, and he shan't be scooped just for the paper!"
But she could not prevent the parrot from calling "Fi-ah! Fi-ah! Fi-ah!" as it often did, nor hinder Ned's guilty start at the sound. It would suddenly rouse him from his reverie, when he sat on the steps of the little side porch where the parrot's cage hung in a honeysuckle vine, and Bob Platt would mark the demonstration with an unconsciously knowing look as he smoked his pipe beneath the flowering tendrils.
The parrot had no sinister intention in the matter. The call was only one of its mimetic accomplishments acquired by much repetition, for there was an engine-house only a block away, and the bird had been accustomed to this shrill alarm for years.
Often Ned had been to this engine-house when the men were at their drill, and he generally escorted the four Platt girls, who could not squeal loud enough nor shrill enough to express their admiration,—not of the splendidly efficient men, swinging down so quickly into place, all equipped and ready in one swift moment as it seemed, but of the horses and their preternatural wisdom in taking up their proper position of their own initiative, without a word of command, at the familiar signal. Of these horses, the favorite was "John Smith," an ancient warrior indeed, who had fought fire many a year before any of the Platt girls were born! Superannuated in fact he was, and had been sold to a dairyman. He himself declined the transfer, and came back to the engine-house at every alarm in the district, scattering the cans from the wagon as he galloped till the streets seemed to be flowing with milk and honey. His loyalty carried the day and he was easily repurchased, the milkman declaring he must give up either the horse or the dairy. At each drill the Platt girls sued for permission to pat the triumphant animal, albeit he took no more notice of their little rosy paws than of so many apple-blossoms. This had always been an enjoyable occasion to Ned, who also admired deeply the veteran "John Smith;" but now he declined to go with the girls.
"I want to see an' hear no more about a fire while I live!" he declared doggedly.
"Fi-ah! Fi-ah! Fi-ah!" clamored Poll, catching at the word, fluttering her green and gold wings, and turning her head, with its crooked beak, downward while she held on to her perch with her hooking claws.
Ned winced anew at the sharp cry, and Bob Platt looked significantly at his wife. "Tryhim!" the look said openly. "Youcan get something out of him!"
But it was needless for Ned to brace himself for resistance. Mrs. Platt would not interfere. Her kindness to him was not diminished even after she had been to see his mother for the first time and had experienced a cold reception. She had heard from Ned in the early days of her acquaintance with the boy that his mother held aloof from strangers, and she had approved of this trait in the simple country woman transplanted to a new sphere, and said that she thought the better of Mrs. Macdonald for it. Perhaps she did not expect this reserve in her turn, when she went to urge the brightest view, and counsel hope and cheerfulness, and adduce reasons to believe that all the disaster would be finally explained and smoothed away. She thought, however, that the attitude of Ned's mother was not unnatural, and that her experience was not calculated to foster much confidence in city people and city ways.
Despite Mrs. Platt's caution and resolve to report, as it were, naught of the details of her visit, Bob Platt contrived to ascertain from his wife the fact that Ned's mother knew no more than they did of the whole strange affair, that Ned had kept his own counsel, and that she had evidently never before heard the names of the two men who had given bail for his appearance at the next term of the Criminal Court, and thus released him from jail.
All this served to increase the strength of the foreman's suspicions. Ned grew conscious of this accession of wonder and doubt that began to envelop him like a veritable atmosphere. So strong were these suspicions that they began to take on the quality of a grim certainty and definite menace. He was aware that they concerned others even more than himself, but who and how he could not for his life divine. He often went over in his mind the details of all the conversations he had heard; he recapitulated the impressions made upon him by gestures, significant glances, all the indicia of unexpressed sentiment, and strove to deduce the meaning of it all and its effect on the future. But these speculations at last availed naught, and as the time for his trial approached the recollection was displaced by his anxiety on his own account, and the deep despondency which the sight of his mother's distress induced in him.
One evening—the long lingering summer twilight still lay upon the roofs and spires—he strolled into the composing-room. It was quite deserted,—a gas-jet here and there, burning dim and low, only accented the gloom. Through the open window he could hear the gay chorus of an operaal frescoin a neighboring beer-garden. In emulation, perhaps, a mocking-bird in a cage in a barber-shop below mounted his perch and filled the gas-lit atmosphere, redolent of bay rum and eau de cologne, with his soft ecstatic roundelay. Ned soon tired of looking out of the window. He had not read at all of late; he had been so absorbed by his troubles that he had not cared to keep posted with the times. As to self-education, of which he had once been so ambitious, he asked himself bitterly what was the use of education to a boy who might spend years and years—the best years of his life—behind the bars.
This evening, however, the old craving came back to him in a measure. He stood irresolute for a moment. Then he turned to the case near by. He was not very expert in deciphering written characters. He often sought by practice to remedy this deficiency. He found generally ample exercise for this inability in the crabbed chirography of the editor-in-chief. Now as he turned up the gas he recognized the august scrawl of that magnate in the "copy" perched above the case.
The next instant his heart gave a great bound. His blood rushed to his head, beating tumultuously for a moment; then it receded, leaving him pale and dizzy, and feeling as if he were likely to faint.
For he saw written there the name of the manager-owner of the theatre, coupled with an odious accusation of burning the building, which no one could know so well as Ned was odiously false.
Ned now learned for the first time that the hot-headed Gorham had taken offense at some expressions in relation to the affair which the paper, surcharged with its grave suspicions, had inadvertently let fall. He had construed this as a reflection upon himself. Arrogant in his innocence, he had published a card—somewhat braggadocio in its tone, it must be confessed—in which he defied the editor to speak out his suspicions plainly, or be branded forever as a coward and a calumniator.
It was the editor's reply which Ned had chanced upon. The newspaper, through its many resources of procuring information, had learned that the insurance companies were on the point of formally refusing to make good the loss on the score of fraud; legal proceedings would doubtless be instituted on both sides. The time for the paper's "scoop" had arrived opportunely with the moment when it was necessary for the editor to answer the allegations against himself.
He had spoken, therefore, and spoken to the point. It had made a very disastrous showing for the owner, although the editor avoided distinct averments. He permitted it to be seen that the manager had given cause for the strongest inferences against him, even to the extent that he had procured the destruction of his own theatre for the sake of securing the money for which it was insured. The point that struck Ned's attention chiefly was the declaration that the boy who had been accused of complicity in the crime and arrested had been bailed by parties who were total strangers to the prisoner and all his friends. When interviewed, one of these sureties, a well-known broker, had given the most casual answers, excusing himself by reason of a flurry in certain stocks in which his customers were largely interested, and which absorbed his attention. The other bondsman, a brother of the broker, admitted frankly and boldly that he had never seen the boy till he went on his bond, and "wouldn't know him now from a gate-post;" and although he and his brother had acted entirely on their own responsibility in the matter and would make good the bond should the boy forfeit the bail, they undertook the liability solely to oblige Mr. Gorham, their close friend, who did not desire to keep so young a lad imprisoned so long a time, while there was still doubt of his guilt, and who had even offered to stand in behind them and pay the money himself should the boy give them the slip. Thus, the editor argued, Mr. Gorham played the double part of prosecutor and in effect bondsman for the prisoner.
Ned's hand shook. So it was to Manager Gorham he was indebted for his liberty. He could not for his life imagine why Gorham had come to his relief. But he was sharp enough to see, when it had been put before the mind in this plain way, that most outsiders would take the same view of it that the editor did; it was evidently the journal's opinion that the manager feared that the boy, if refused bail, would speak out and accuse him of himself burning or procuring the destruction of the building. The editor concluded, perhaps by way of vindicating his own courage and "taking the dare," by advising the insurance companies to pay nothing till their investigations should have been pushed in this direction, and he recommended the owner of the theatre to the kind attention of the grand jury and the attorney for the State.
Ned, in an agony of remorse and anxiety, clung to the case, almost overpowered by the realization how evil a thing concealment is, and what ruin it had wrought here. The incendiaries, he reflected, had doubtless made their escape in this long interval. He and his fears and his groundless reasoning were responsible for that,—for more!—for the blasting of an honest man's character and the wreck of his fortune, for the insurance companies would pay naught! It seemed a grotesque libel on likelihood, but the manager might even be arrested, tried, and serve a long term in the penitentiary, charged with burning his own house to defraud the insurance companies, because of the wickedness of a gang of knaves and a foolish boy's folly.
Ned grew more and more alarmed as he read again and again those strong logical statements that would forever blast the man who had befriended him at his utmost need, for the paper was a power in the land, and the editor's word weighed with all sorts of people. Ned might now have confessed all,—he thought of this once. The habit of concealment, however, does not give way readily. It yields only after the exhaustion of its uttermost resources. He asked himself who would now believe him? He was already accounted a mere tool and accomplice, and his puny efforts to whitewash such smirches as those intricate blots and tangles of loop-letters had put upon the manager's name would be ludicrously futile. He felt that he could measure the incredulity of the public.
He could measure, too, its credulity, alack, when all the town would read to-morrow the editor's reply!
The town never read it!
In a paroxysm of rage and fear Ned suddenly clutched the sheet and thrust it into the gas-jet. The blaze leaped up. Distinct shadows started forth from the murky glooms. The motion alarmed him. He glanced fearfully over his shoulder. He was still quaking at his own deed when the "copy" fell, a cinder. But perhaps his purpose was not yet served, he argued, for the article might have been set up. He looked at the imposing stone. The type was all ready, and in the chase,—the proof had been taken,—the revised smirched sheets lay hard by, all bearing the cabalistic sign O.K., the fiat of the press reader.
"They won't look at it again before the form is locked and goes to press," Ned said tremulously, for an audacious new idea had flashed into his mind. The article had compactly filled one third of a column. He swept the types of this space from the stone and replaced them at random in the boxes. Then selecting a larger variety, he began some of the fastest type-setting ever done in that composing-room. For copy he had gotten hold of a new prospectus of the paper, which was still in manuscript. Judiciously leaded he thought it might fill the blank space, and this substitute for the article which he had done away with he judged was innocent enough. He worked on hard and desperately,—he did not know how long.
At length he was slipping the last "stick" off upon the galley; he hastily shunted the type from the galley to the stone in the space that the obnoxious editorial had occupied; he readjusted the "furniture" by a stroke of luck, as it were, and turning away to the window he perched himself upon the sill and gazed demurely at the moon as a step upon the stairs announced an approach.
CHAPTER X
The step on the stairs was an unsteady step. The foreman reeled into the room. Ned's eyes brightened. Would not Bob Platt's opportune spree seem the explanation of any difficulty that might arise on account of the lost copy, and also of any deficiency in the type-setting?
Still he hardly felt secure from detection until he saw the foreman with the quoins and the shooting-stick in his hand. Not so tipsy was Bob Platt that he was not now as always the deft and experienced handicraftsman. A blow from the mallet here and a blow there,—the locking was done; and Ned, feeling tipsy himself, dizzy with excitement, crept out and sat down on the dark staircase.
He wished no one to hear how he panted, for he could hardly breathe as he reflected on his daring deed. His eyes were hot; he wanted no one to see the exultant gleam that was chasing the fright out of them.
Now and then he squirmed aside to escape a big foot that brought a burly shadow lumbering up the stairs, for the printers were coming in again; so presently were the latest dispatches and the last of the copy. The telephone bell continually jingled. There was once more the stir of haste and work and confusion in the composing-room,—the setting up of the final columns for the other forms. Ned listened occasionally, expecting to hear his name called. But Bob Platt did not need him. It seemed a long time that he sat there, gazing up through the narrow stair window at the stars, those fair and foreign worlds, glittering so high above the roofs, above the clouds, above the winds.
He heard now and then the agitated voice of the telegraph editor. Once a reporter came up the stairs in great bounds and with a momentum as if he had been flung from a catapult. Doubtless he thought he had a "scoop." "It's a fake, I bet," thought Ned, recovering his normal size, for he had shrunken to very small proportions to avoid that headlong rush. He had the best of reasons in his own experience to know how very thin some of these scoops were.
He realized how the hour was wearing on when he heard the rattle of the mailing wagons on the stones in the side street. It must be midnight.
Suddenly the thunder of the printing-press broke forth, clank, clank, clamor and clank. The air was vibrating with its regular, rhythmic throbs. The building palpitated with it as if it were alive. It was like the beating heart of a great full-pulsed civilization.
"They're printing my work right now," cried Ned with all the pride of an author.
Then a twinge of anxiety seized him. He remembered his limited opportunities, and he had the grace to hope that there were not too many mistakes in the type-setting.
But such a sight has rarely been seen as that presented by the third column of the second page when the reeking sheets came from the press. It was probably discovered by the more distant subscribers receiving the journal by mail before the paper, as personified by its employees, knew what had happened to itself.
The town, the immediate vicinity, also read it betimes. And certainly, although the enormity was caught in the second edition and hastily replaced with an article already in type on the tariff, the editor-in-chief was an object of pity the next morning, when opening complacently the folds of the journal, his eye fell on Ned's handiwork in the midst of the wit and wisdom of the important editorials. There, instead of the severe "reply" that should prove he was no merely malicious calumniator of innocence and integrity, was a typographical caricature of the prospectus of the paper.
Wildly leaded, with inverted u's and n's and p's and d's, incredibly "fat," it drunkenly and disconnectedly protested its devotion to the best interests of the public; "the People's Paper," it reiterated, with every inadvertent caper the printer's art is heir to. It bragged of its facilities, its presses, its talented writers, its supplements, and with orthographical vagaries to which the phonetic craze presents a soberly conventional aspect it pointed with pride to its career as a popular educator. Such "spells" as Ned had perpetrated! Lastly, with a crookedness that was very like a typographic leer, it begged to call attention to its handsome appearance.
Rude Boreas was but a piping reed to the way the staff roared with wrath. Ned arrived at the office in the midst of the storm. He had a confused sense of the general desolation; then the surroundings were canceled by the sight of the foreman's face, pale and agitated.
"What ails the boss?" he demanded of a junior compositor.
"The grand bounce!" responded that worthy.
Ned winced. This was an unexpected turn of affairs. He remembered the foreman's wife, who had fallen into a hopeless stage of consumption, and their four small and helpless girls.
"He has been tight afore this, a-many a time," said Ned doggedly, trying to justify himself in his own mind for not having foreseen this possibility. Scheme as he might, things went worse and worse. "He has been drunk time and time again."
"Never like this," said the young typo, bursting with laughter. "My eye! When I first saw that column I thought I had the jim-jams myself."
In the investigations that were in progress the foreman admitted that he had been very drunk the previous night. Therefore he was at the mercy of anything that circumstantial evidence could prove upon him. The fact was elicited by reference to the proof that the article in question had been set up correctly. "And then," he confessed, "I came up here as drunk as a mink—a mule—after everything was in the chase, to lock the form, and like a tom-fool I must have set up this prospectus from the new copy, and I don't knowhowI could have knocked the type into this crazy pi."
This seemed the only reasonable solution of the mystery, and it was accepted without demur or question. While Ned went about his ordinary work he listened anxiously to the sound of the editor's voice as he still bemoaned himself with his confrères in the "rinktum." Time had softened his sorrows only a very little. His tones were still pervaded by rage and grief, modulated but slightly by an appreciation of futility. It was like the subsiding anguish of a bull-dog when the burglar is gone!
Ned could but hope that the "bouncing" of the foreman would be reconsidered. This Bob Platt was a good fellow, and heretofore his weakness for strong drink had never interfered with his capable performance of duty. He had been in the office twenty years as man and boy; and now he was to be chucked out of it for an offense which he had never committed.
"He oughtn't ter have been drunk," thought Ned.
And this was very true!
Bob Platt was a good printer, however; gilt-edged, Ned argued, taking courage,—and could no doubt easily find work elsewhere, with all his experience as foreman and capacity in management. Then Ned reflected that this story would be likely to create a ripple in typographic circles, and employers would be indisposed to engage a printer whose sprees expressed themselves in such fantastic publicity. Bob Platt might fail to get work. And there was the sick wife, and there were the small girls.
Ned once more began the profitable and pleasant occupation of hoping against hope. The staff wouldneverpart with Bob Platt. Ned hardly believed they could run the paper without him.
The printer's devil would not realize the mischief he had unintentionally done till he saw Bob Platt standing in the door of the composing-room, leaving behind him his friends, his twenty years of industry and capacity, and the trustworthy reputation they had earned for him, all lost, as completely canceled as the editor's copy.
He was trying to carry it off jauntily. His hat was stuck on one side. He chewed hard on his quid of tobacco. He laughed as he nodded over his shoulder to the group of printers in the composing-room. "Be good to yourselves, boys! So long!"
Ned saw the haggard change in his face as he turned. He was going out empty-handed, with a dying wife and four small girls, to meet the cold, hard, tight-fisted, grinding world. Ned knew how cold, how hard, how tight-fisted, how grinding that world is!
"Say!" he screamed suddenly, throwing himself upon Bob Platt, "I done it! I done it! I done it, myself. If they hang me for it I can't hide it! I burnt the copy an' distributed the type of that editorial, an' fixed the purspectus in its place"—he remembered how awfully it looked—"as well as I could." The champion concluded with a sob.
Bob Platt stood for a moment staring, motionless.
"You Black-eyed Bamboozler of Beelzebub!" he exclaimed, with an unconscious alliterative habit contracted from the corrupting influence of headlines.
He might have been expected to fall on the self-accuser's neck for joy. He did nothing of the sort. He clutched Ned by the nape of that structure, and the doughty devil's feet hardly touched the floor once in the rapid transit to the "rinktum."
"Here's this Imp of Iniquity," cried the foreman indignantly, "who says that he distributed the type and canceled the copy and set up that prospectus on purpose!"
"What on earth"—they mentioned a different region—"did you do it for?" rose the editorial chorus.
"'Cause," sobbed the champion censor of the press, "I didn't want that copee ter be printed. 'T warn't true!"
There was a short silence.
The conclave of editors stood aghast at the idea of printing truth only!
The managing editor was the first to recover his faculties. "You are the boy who was arrested about this affair of Gorham's Theatre, I believe?" he said.
"Yes, sir," sobbed Ned. "An' Mr. Gorham never had no more to do with burnin' that theaytre than I had. 'T was terspite himit was burned."
"Then you know who did burn it?"
The managing editor had fairly cornered Ned, but the obstinate boy refused to reply. For a time threats and persuasions were alike useless. Only by strongly representing to him that Gorham would be ruined unless the matter were cleared up was the truth sifted out little by little.
Mr. Gorham was finally summoned, and a full explanation ensued. He fairly foamed at the mouth with rage when with much difficulty he was at last made to understand the nature and extent of the suspicions harbored against him. He promptly identified the several malefactors from Ned's description of them, called in the police, and gave such details of their associates, habits, and habitat that before nightfall one of them, the bandy-legged scamp, who had once been employed about the theatre as a supernumerary actor, was arrested and safely lodged in jail. He "squealed" very promptly and earnestly in the hope of being allowed the benefit of "State's evidence," and by his means the star's diamonds were traced through a variety of "fences" and recovered; his accomplice in this theft was also apprehended by the trail of the stolen costumes, and somewhat later the "first player" was captured and cast for a rôle with a long run behind the bars. Ned was much relieved when it was now made known that the company had lost nothing by the forcing of the safe in the theatre, for contrary to the usual habit the receipts were not left on that occasion in the office of the building and the criminals had gained practically nothing in bursting the lock.
Ned was amazed to see how the truth does prevail, how readily and implicitly his story was believed when it was given from the witness stand, and how promptly he was acquitted. Gorham took advantage of every technicality and prosecuted the villains to the extremest limit of the law. They deserved all that they got, which was indeed good measure, but in his observation of Gorham in these days Ned became more and more aware that impulse is a poor substitute for principle as a basis of action, and that although impulse may serve as an excuse for much that is fierce or weak, it detracts from the merit of what is good. Gorham's kindly whim which restored him to liberty was no whit more kindly than the severe editor's lecture bidding him observe what great evils may grow from a cowardly concealment of the truth.
"It would have ruined us all but for the gilt-edged way the champion set that type," the managing editor presently observed aside, with a laugh, to his colleague. And with the recollection the editor-in-chief, whose copy was canceled by the devil, was at last able to laugh too.
For those strong and false accusations of Gorham, which would have laid the paper liable for libel, were never published, and the insurance companies made good the loss by the fire in great haste and with many plausible and polite excuses for the previous delay.
Peter Bateman's perjury was committed in so important a case that it did not escape notice. On the trial he broke down and confessed, hoping to elude punishment on the strength of his penitence. In fact he was so limp, so tearful, so flabby, so fat, that he produced a youthful, irresponsible impression, and narrowly missing the State Prison, he was sent to the Reform School, where it is to be hoped he is learning that there is some policy as well as piety in keeping the ninth commandment.
Ned continues to work in the composing-room bossed by Bob Platt. For on the memorable day when the champion's exploit of type-setting was explained, the whole editorial corps turned to and besought the discharged foreman, unjustly accused and maltreated, to remain, and after much insistence he gracefully yielded.
But Bob Platt learned a lesson too, and has joined the Sons of Temperance.
Often now when the evening is lingering long on the spires and domes and mansard roofs, and the moon rises up from among them somewhere, as if she were a resident of the town rarely straying beyond the corporate limits, and the mocking-bird mounts his perch in the barber-shop below and sings his roundelay,—poor captive troubadour!—and the stars muster one by one, and the composing-room is dusky save for a dim gas-jet here and there, and is filled with mellow shadows and mellow memories too, the foreman and the devil are wont to lean on the window-sill and look out and enjoy the interval of rest, and the touch of the breeze, and the faint, fading, roseate flush in the west, and laugh as they talk over again in much amity this exploit of the champion's type-setting.
The Riverside PressElectrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A.
BOOKS BY"Charles Egbert Craddock."(MARY N. MURFREE.)
THE CHAMPION. With a Frontispiece. 12mo, $1.20,net.IN THE TENNESSEE MOUNTAINS. Short Stories. 16mo, $1.25.DOWN THE RAVINE. For Young People. Illustrated. 16mo, $1.00.THE PROPHET OF THE GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS. A Novel. 16mo, $1.25.IN THE CLOUDS. A Novel. 16mo, $1.25.THE STORY OF KEEDON BLUFFS. For Young People. 16mo, $1.00.THE DESPOT OF BROOMSEDGE COVE. A Novel. 16mo, $1.25.WHERE THE BATTLE WAS FOUGHT. A Novel. 16mo, $1.25.HIS VANISHED STAR. A Novel. 16mo, $1.25.THE MYSTERY OF WITCH-FACE MOUNTAIN. 16mo, $1.25.THE YOUNG MOUNTAINEERS. Illustrated 12mo, $1.50.THE JUGGLER. A Novel. 16mo, $1.25.
THE CHAMPION. With a Frontispiece. 12mo, $1.20,net.
IN THE TENNESSEE MOUNTAINS. Short Stories. 16mo, $1.25.
DOWN THE RAVINE. For Young People. Illustrated. 16mo, $1.00.
THE PROPHET OF THE GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS. A Novel. 16mo, $1.25.
IN THE CLOUDS. A Novel. 16mo, $1.25.
THE STORY OF KEEDON BLUFFS. For Young People. 16mo, $1.00.
THE DESPOT OF BROOMSEDGE COVE. A Novel. 16mo, $1.25.
WHERE THE BATTLE WAS FOUGHT. A Novel. 16mo, $1.25.
HIS VANISHED STAR. A Novel. 16mo, $1.25.
THE MYSTERY OF WITCH-FACE MOUNTAIN. 16mo, $1.25.
THE YOUNG MOUNTAINEERS. Illustrated 12mo, $1.50.
THE JUGGLER. A Novel. 16mo, $1.25.
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