An hour later, with a nice, shiny new padlock, I went back to the composing-room. But I very nearly fainted when I saw the activity going on back there. The composing-room was filled with High-Pockets Joneses.
Two still were at the linecasting machines, and a whole crew of others were running around the floor.
"Where's the foreman?" I barked.
High-Pockets Jones—one of them—came to attention. "He went home. He was quite discouraged; he told us to throw in all the standing type we could find."
It didn't look good. I had the feeling that High-Pockets was laughing at me—this High-Pockets, anyway.
That reminded me. I gathered up all the High-Pocketses in the composing-room and lined them up. There were nine—exactly nine—every one of them over seven feet tall and thin as a sidestick, every one of them with a gentle, booming voice.
I wanted to tell the original High-Pockets to gather them all up and put them back together, but I didn't know how to find the original.
Well, they couldn't get me down. I fooled them. I told them all to take the rest of the day off—at full pay.
All nine of them washed up together and left together. It was the damnedest thing I ever saw offstage. Nine identical High-Pocketses—all so tall they had to weave around the neon lights instead of ducking under them. It was enough to give a man nightmares, to watch that line of High-Pockets Joneses advancing across an open composing-room.
This kind of thing went on the next day, and the next. Every day there were nine High-Pockets Joneses in the composing-room. Everybody was falling over everybody else, when they weren't standing around laughing up their sleeves.