“Well,” he said. “Which?”
“I stick,” plagiarized Jeremy.
Andrew Galpin’s relief when the decision was reported to him was almost pathetic. “Boss, if you’d laid down on this I was about through with human nature,” was his comment. “And now, what’s to come?”
Jeremy’s lined face puckered into a cherubic smile. “The last trench, and a damned good fight in it,” he said softly.
CHAPTER XIV
MR. BURTON HIGMAN mounted the stairs of The Guardian office, dressed in his best suit of clothes. A powerfully inferential mind might have derived from his proud and important bearing that he had matters of moment on his mind; might further have deduced that he had been on a railway journey, from the presence of a cinder in his ear. He wore the air and expression, sanctified, as it were, all but martyr-like, as of one who, if he had not already died for his country, was at least prepared to. For young Mr. Higman had been performing that miracle, forever dear to dreaming boyhood; he had been saving the world. Such, at all events, was his own glorious interpretation of his enterprise.
The clock, pointing an accusing digit at V, was the only sign of life in the inner den. Buddy went to Mr. Galpin’s office. Empty also. So there was none to apprise him of the Boss’s final determination. A group of printers, scrubbed and clean, clumped down the stairs, still discussing the exciting rumor that somebody had bought out Robson; for every press-room is a clearing-house of gossip, technical and other.
“Hey, Buddy,” one of them hailed. “Got a new job yet?”