“They told me at the restaurant they reckoned you lived yere, and the night watchman at the door headed me straight up. When he knew whar I kem from he wanted to know what the news was, but I told him he'd better buy an extra and see.”
“Well, what did you come for?” said the editor impatiently.
“The foreman said it was important, and he wanted to know afore he went to press ef this yer correction was YOURS?”
He went to the table, unrolled the proofs, and, taking out the slip, pointed to a marked paragraph. “The foreman says the reporter who brought the news allows he got it straight first-hand! But ef you've corrected it, he reckons you know best.”
Breeze saw at a glance that the paragraph alluded to was not of his own writing, but one of several news items furnished by reporters. These had been “set up” in the same “galley,” and consequently appeared in the same proof-slip. He was about to say curtly that neither the matter nor the correction was his, when something odd in the correction of the item struck him. It read as follows:—
“It appears that the notorious 'Jim Bodine,' who is in hiding and badly wanted by the Vigilance Committee, has been tempted lately into a renewal of his old recklessness. He was seen in Sacramento Street the other night by two separate witnesses, one of whom followed him, but he escaped in some friendly doorway.”
The words “in Sacramento Street” were stricken out and replaced by the correction “on the Saucelito shore,” and the words “friendly doorway” were changed to “friendly dinghy.” The correction was not his, nor the handwriting, which was further disguised by being an imitation of print. A strange idea seized him.
“Has any one seen these proofs since I left them at the office?”
“No, only the foreman, sir.”
He remembered that he had left the proofs lying openly on his table when he was called to the office at the stroke of the alarm bell; he remembered the figure he saw gliding from his room on his return. She had been there alone with the proofs; she only could have tampered with them.