And this was very true!
Bob Platt was a good printer, however; gilt-edged, Ned argued, taking courage,—and could no doubt easily find work elsewhere, with all his experience as foreman and capacity in management. Then Ned reflected that this story would be likely to create a ripple in typographic circles, and employers would be indisposed to engage a printer whose sprees expressed themselves in such fantastic publicity. Bob Platt might fail to get work. And there was the sick wife, and there were the small girls.
Ned once more began the profitable and pleasant occupation of hoping against hope. The staff would never part with Bob Platt. Ned hardly believed they could run the paper without him.
The printer's devil would not realize the mischief he had unintentionally done till he saw Bob Platt standing in the door of the composing-room, leaving behind him his friends, his twenty years of industry and capacity, and the trustworthy reputation they had earned for him, all lost, as completely canceled as the editor's copy.
He was trying to carry it off jauntily. His hat was stuck on one side. He chewed hard on his quid of tobacco. He laughed as he nodded over his shoulder to the group of printers in the composing-room. "Be good to yourselves, boys! So long!"
Ned saw the haggard change in his face as he turned. He was going out empty-handed, with a dying wife and four small girls, to meet the cold, hard, tight-fisted, grinding world. Ned knew how cold, how hard, how tight-fisted, how grinding that world is!
"Say!" he screamed suddenly, throwing himself upon Bob Platt, "I done it! I done it! I done it, myself. If they hang me for it I can't hide it! I burnt the copy an' distributed the type of that editorial, an' fixed the purspectus in its place"—he remembered how awfully it looked—"as well as I could." The champion concluded with a sob.
Bob Platt stood for a moment staring, motionless.
"You Black-eyed Bamboozler of Beelzebub!" he exclaimed, with an unconscious alliterative habit contracted from the corrupting influence of headlines.
He might have been expected to fall on the self-accuser's neck for joy. He did nothing of the sort. He clutched Ned by the nape of that structure, and the doughty devil's feet hardly touched the floor once in the rapid transit to the "rinktum."