"Just like Ned! He doesn't talk any nowadays. For the same reason, I reckon. Might tell too much!"
"Oh, take your cake an' go!" screams Pete in desperation.
"Where is it? Oh, on the counter; well,—is that coffee cake or currant bun? One thing is certain—there will be a reporter at the trial!" the cub-printer adds with a menacing inflection, as one should say, "The judgment day is a-coming along!"
Under this stress Pete tries to rally, realizing that he is even now metaphorically face to face with the public. "Must I wrap up the coffee cake?" with a smile that would be an appropriate concomitant of a raging toothache.
"About as well as anything," and with a look indicative of the boxer latent in every man and a disposition to trounce Pete, which with difficulty he holds in leash, the cub-printer goes his way to his fellows of the composing-room and reports no progress.
Again and again scenes almost exactly similar to this took place, with only a change as to the identity of Pete's interlocutor, and as often he pleaded with his parents to be released from the duties he had been so anxious to assume in "tendin' shop." But they believed, and not without reason, that the street awaited Pete's idle time and there mischief lurked, and thus with his gnawing conscience and his miserable fears and his sadly jocose martyrdom he counted the days, and repented of the past, and dreaded the future, and kept a lively and anxious lookout for Ned!
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.