Rude Boreas was but a piping reed to the way the staff roared with wrath. Ned arrived at the office in the midst of the storm. He had a confused sense of the general desolation; then the surroundings were canceled by the sight of the foreman's face, pale and agitated.
"What ails the boss?" he demanded of a junior compositor.
"The grand bounce!" responded that worthy.
Ned winced. This was an unexpected turn of affairs. He remembered the foreman's wife, who had fallen into a hopeless stage of consumption, and their four small and helpless girls.
"He has been tight afore this, a-many a time," said Ned doggedly, trying to justify himself in his own mind for not having foreseen this possibility. Scheme as he might, things went worse and worse. "He has been drunk time and time again."
"Never like this," said the young typo, bursting with laughter. "My eye! When I first saw that column I thought I had the jim-jams myself."
In the investigations that were in progress the foreman admitted that he had been very drunk the previous night. Therefore he was at the mercy of anything that circumstantial evidence could prove upon him. The fact was elicited by reference to the proof that the article in question had been set up correctly. "And then," he confessed, "I came up here as drunk as a mink—a mule—after everything was in the chase, to lock the form, and like a tom-fool I must have set up this prospectus from the new copy, and I don't know how I could have knocked the type into this crazy pi."
This seemed the only reasonable solution of the mystery, and it was accepted without demur or question. While Ned went about his ordinary work he listened anxiously to the sound of the editor's voice as he still bemoaned himself with his confrères in the "rinktum." Time had softened his sorrows only a very little. His tones were still pervaded by rage and grief, modulated but slightly by an appreciation of futility. It was like the subsiding anguish of a bull-dog when the burglar is gone!
Ned could but hope that the "bouncing" of the foreman would be reconsidered. This Bob Platt was a good fellow, and heretofore his weakness for strong drink had never interfered with his capable performance of duty. He had been in the office twenty years as man and boy; and now he was to be chucked out of it for an offense which he had never committed.
"He oughtn't ter have been drunk," thought Ned.