"Naw, sir," admitted Ned. "I disremember their names. I never seen either o' them till to-day."
Strange as he had thought the occurrence at first, it appeared still more strange now when he saw how others regarded it. They found it difficult, too, to believe that two men whom Ned had never before seen, whose very names he did not know, would each stake a thousand dollars upon his honesty when he was accused of house-breaking, larceny, and arson, and had just been committed to jail after his examining trial. The managing editor, who had known him long, had done all that was liberal, sympathetic, and sensible. That two strangers should be even asked to go upon his bail-bond seemed to Ned a wild impulsive vagary,—as indeed it was.
It did not seem so to the others. Business men do not account for the assumption of financial liabilities on the basis of an impulsive vagary. There was a very stern expression on the editor's face as he turned away. This journal had done much to unmask corruption in high places, and to uphold the standard of public morals and private integrity. That it was not altogether too good for this world and a very human newspaper after all was manifest in its overweening and puffed up pride in its career of righteousness. It had waxed bold and censorious,—it was even esteemed insolent and trenching upon the reckless,—with its successes and its impunity, and it spoke out very openly without fear or favor.
Ned with a sinking heart began to experience a vague but troublous fear that further disasters were impending because of this. A little later he chanced to be passing through the local room. He was obliged to pause in his errand to the city editor, for that personage himself was blocking the aisle as he stood and conferred with a reporter at one of the tables.
The reporter, eager and over-zealous as a cub-reporter is apt to be, had sprung up as if to meet so good an assignment halfway, clutching his precious note-book to his bosom in his frenzy of haste and repeating his orders as if to fix them in his mind. "Yes, sir,—go to the jail to-night, even if I can't get a peep at the bail-bond till to-morrow."
Ned did not understand,—why was he going to the jail?
The boy's face bore so pointed an inquiry that the city editor noticed it as he turned around and almost stumbled over the printer's devil with the message from the foreman of the composing-room. The city editor did not reply to the urgency for "local copee."
"Hey, boy," he said irritably, "always under foot!" Ned fancied that the editor would prefer that he should not have heard the reporter's assignment.
But this was no "scoop," the boy argued sagely. The detail of the examining trial would be in all the other papers in the morning. And a bail-bond could no more be hidden than a city that is set on a hill.
He fancied later that an effort was made in the editorial departments of the paper to allay his suspicions that aught unusual was perceived about the affair. Nothing more was asked of him, nor mentioned in his presence. The editors and the elder members of the reportorial staff maintained without apparent strain this check upon their personal and professional curiosity. But he could detect the "cub-reporters," the devil's natural enemies, looking at him sometimes with an eager greed to discuss the matter with him that could not be disguised. "Like a dog at a bone," thought Ned, in dismay. For he realized that the editors had serious purposes in this scheming silence. They evidently desired that he should not take alarm prematurely, and, reporting from the paper on his own account, instead of for it, convey warnings to others of the storm brewing there.