Sure it was simple. It didn’t occur to us that Etaoin might not like it, or be able to do anything about it. Yes, it sounded simple and conclusive. We drank to it.
We drank well to it, and I was still in the hospital Monday night. But by that time I was feeling well enough to use the telephone, and I tried to reach George. He wasn’t in. Then it was Tuesday.
Wednesday evening the doctor lectured me on quantitative drinking at my age, and said I was well enough to leave, but that if I tried it again—
I went around to George’s home. A gaunt man with a thin face came to the door. Then he spoke and I saw it was George Ronson. All he said was, “Hullo, Walter; come in.” There wasn’t any hope or happiness in his voice. He looked and sounded like a zombi.
I followed him inside, and I said, “George, buck up. It can’t be that bad. Tell me.”
“It’s no use, Walter,” he said. “I’m licked. It—it came and got me. I’ve got to run it for that forty-hour week whether I want to or not. It—it treats me like a servant, Walter.”
I got him to sit down and talk quietly after a while, and he explained. He’d gone down to the office as usual Monday morning to straighten out some financial matters, but he had no intention of going back into the shop. However, at eight o’clock, he’d heard something moving out in the back room.
With sudden dread, he’d gone to the door to look in. The Linotype—George’s eyes were wild as he told me about it—was moving, moving toward the door of the office.
He wasn’t quite clear about its exact method of locomotion—later we found casters—but there it came; slowly at first, but with every inch gaining in speed and confidence.
Somehow, George knew right away what it wanted. And knew, in that knowledge, that he was lost. The machine, as soon as he was within sight of it, stopped moving and began to click and several slugs dropped out into the stick. Like a man walking to the scaffold, George walked over and read those lines: