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.