CHAPTER IX

It seemed to Ned that the best use he could make of his liberty was to pound Pete Bateman.

When, still silent, he parted from his silent bondsmen, he went without delay to his false friend's home. He took the alleyway, as he always did, being pretty sure of finding the boys at this hour in the back yard splitting kindling or bringing in the wash from the clothesline, or engaged in similar small domestic duties. In fact he heard the sound of chopping wood as he opened the gate.

The sound abruptly ceased when he thrust in his head.

It had grown quite dark. He could not guess whether the figure with the shapeless cap bending over the kindling were Pete or Tom, until after an astonished gaze at the intruder it skulked behind a wash-tub set high on a wooden bench.

That was Pete--every time!

Now and again the old cap peeped hastily out from behind the wash-tub and was as hastily withdrawn.

Ned still stood at the gate. He hardly knew what had become of his resolve. He tried to rally it by thinking of the fate in store for him when this interval of liberty should be at an end and the day set for his trial dawn.

Here was the lying witness at his mercy. He could thrash him, and thrash him well,--for fat Pete was no fighter. But somehow he felt that a boy who hid behind his mother's wash-tub ought to be allowed to stay there. Pete did not seem worth a good substantial licking.

As Ned stood undecided one of his mother's injunctions flashed through his memory.

"Ef ye can't git yer consent ter return good fur evil," she often said, "hold yer hands ennyhow from harmin' them ez have hurt ye."

All his troubles, first and last, had come from disregarding that simple, uncultured mother's simple precepts.

Ned shut the gate and walked away.

His account of the day's proceedings seemed a wild, terrible story to the panic-stricken woman who sat cowering in the little room that opened on the vistas of chimney-pots and clouds and stars. He found her in tears. She had just learned of his arrest through a message from the managing editor of the paper, who sent to say that he had arranged to have Ned's wages paid to her during the boy's imprisonment as regularly as if he were still at work. The editor had some charitable hobbies which thus liberally expressed themselves, aided in this instance by his confrères of the various departments of the paper. For although the editorial force deemed Ned the tool of the incendiaries and thieves, and thought that his obstinate silence was strangely incriminating, they still had faith enough in him to believe him the victim of a deception, and innocent of all intentional wrong-doing; that he was somehow the dupe of an over-reaching craft, and the forlorn scapegoat of the real criminals. Even thus, the situation was discreditable to the last degree, and well calculated to alienate whatever friends the little lad had been able to make for himself. But when the "dude reporter," who had hied himself straightway to the office, detailed the strange disasters that had befallen the printer's devil, the editorial force remembered a thousand trifling benefactions received at his small, willing, ink-smirched hands, and a subscription, circulated among the desks, aggregated a sum sufficient to justify a promise of the continuance of the payment of his weekly wages for the indefinite time of his incarceration, till his trial should set the question of his guilt or innocence at rest.

Ned's presence at liberty once more could not reassure his mother. Long after he had gone to announce his release to his employers and resume his work she crouched pale and chill beside the monkey-stove, although the air was warm and languorous. Her mind was filled with terror for the future and with those ever unavailing regrets for the past and the simple country home of her youth.

As Ned reached the newspaper building and looked up at the brilliantly illuminated windows flaring against the dark sky, he had a renewed sense of the blessedness of liberty and the privilege of labor, and once more the singular manner in which bail had come to him recurred to his mind.

His surprise, however, at the sensation which the story of his release produced in the sensation-seasoned composing-room soon effaced every other impression.

"Hold on a minute," said the foreman, interrupting the recital in its midst.

He stepped into the office of the managing editor, and presently that magnate came out, looking alert and inquisitive and catechistic, as a newspaper man will when there is a mystery in the air.

From some subtle instinct Ned knew that the foreman had made representations which the managing editor had pronounced preposterous, and had refused to believe.

"So you were bailed, were you?" he asked.

"Yes, sir," replied Ned.

The editor fitted the tips of his fingers together very accurately while he looked hard at Ned. He spoke slowly and impressively.

"Considering the very serious nature of the crimes with which you are charged and the amount fixed for bail, your sureties must repose a great deal of confidence in you. I hope that you will not abuse it."

"Naw, sir, I ain't got no notion o' runnin' away," declared Ned stoutly.

Both the editor and the foreman were looking at him very gravely.

"Who were your bondsmen?" asked the editor.

"Sir?" said Ned, bewildered by their manner.

"Who gave bail for you?" The editor varied the phrase.

"I dunno, sir," replied the little devil.

The foreman grinned triumphantly.

"_Don't know?_" echoed the editor amazed.

"Naw, sir," admitted Ned. "I disremember their names. I never seen either o' them till to-day."

Strange as he had thought the occurrence at first, it appeared still more strange now when he saw how others regarded it. They found it difficult, too, to believe that two men whom Ned had never before seen, whose very names he did not know, would each stake a thousand dollars upon his honesty when he was accused of house-breaking, larceny, and arson, and had just been committed to jail after his examining trial. The managing editor, who had known him long, had done all that was liberal, sympathetic, and sensible. That two strangers should be even asked to go upon his bail-bond seemed to Ned a wild impulsive vagary,--as indeed it was.

It did not seem so to the others. Business men do not account for the assumption of financial liabilities on the basis of an impulsive vagary. There was a very stern expression on the editor's face as he turned away. This journal had done much to unmask corruption in high places, and to uphold the standard of public morals and private integrity. That it was not altogether too good for this world and a very human newspaper after all was manifest in its overweening and puffed up pride in its career of righteousness. It had waxed bold and censorious,--it was even esteemed insolent and trenching upon the reckless,--with its successes and its impunity, and it spoke out very openly without fear or favor.

Ned with a sinking heart began to experience a vague but troublous fear that further disasters were impending because of this. A little later he chanced to be passing through the local room. He was obliged to pause in his errand to the city editor, for that personage himself was blocking the aisle as he stood and conferred with a reporter at one of the tables.

The reporter, eager and over-zealous as a cub-reporter is apt to be, had sprung up as if to meet so good an assignment halfway, clutching his precious note-book to his bosom in his frenzy of haste and repeating his orders as if to fix them in his mind. "Yes, sir,--go to the jail to-night, even if I can't get a peep at the bail-bond till to-morrow."

Ned did not understand,--why was he going to the jail?

The boy's face bore so pointed an inquiry that the city editor noticed it as he turned around and almost stumbled over the printer's devil with the message from the foreman of the composing-room. The city editor did not reply to the urgency for "local copee."

"Hey, boy," he said irritably, "always under foot!" Ned fancied that the editor would prefer that he should not have heard the reporter's assignment.

But this was no "scoop," the boy argued sagely. The detail of the examining trial would be in all the other papers in the morning. And a bail-bond could no more be hidden than a city that is set on a hill.

He fancied later that an effort was made in the editorial departments of the paper to allay his suspicions that aught unusual was perceived about the affair. Nothing more was asked of him, nor mentioned in his presence. The editors and the elder members of the reportorial staff maintained without apparent strain this check upon their personal and professional curiosity. But he could detect the "cub-reporters," the devil's natural enemies, looking at him sometimes with an eager greed to discuss the matter with him that could not be disguised. "Like a dog at a bone," thought Ned, in dismay. For he realized that the editors had serious purposes in this scheming silence. They evidently desired that he should not take alarm prematurely, and, reporting from the paper on his own account, instead of for it, convey warnings to others of the storm brewing there.

Their caution, however, did not extend to the composing-room. They regarded the printers as in some sort appurtenances of those precincts and with no functions nor interests beyond,--the mere tongue as it were of the paper, while the editorial force represented the subtler and essential powers of speech. It is needless to say that the compositors took no such inarticulate view of themselves. Ned heard much in these days among the cases which he could not understand and which therefore made him wince. The printers never tired of asking questions about the unexpected bail, even when at work, thus infringing the rule of comparative silence usually preserved. They maintained, however, an affectation of the most careless and casual interest, pausing in the midst of an interrogatory, for instance, to slip the last stick off upon the galley, and not resuming till the type was locked to take the galley proof. They received his replies with sly winks at each other, significant leers, and similar demonstrations, until the boy, bewildered and angry, grew sullen and would not answer at all. He perceived in dismay that his silence added to their excitement and interest, and he began to believe that they too entertained strange suspicions about the affair of the bail-bond. He discovered that they made an effort to sound Peter Bateman and to find out from him if he knew anything of the mysterious reason which actuated Ned's sureties in going on his bail-bond and thus effecting his release from jail, where otherwise he must have languished for many weary months.

Peter Bateman's domestic relations were such as to prevent him from being altogether secure or happy in the time intervening between Ned's committal and trial, even if he had not dreaded the ordeal of testifying again and in the criminal court. The Bateman family were under no illusions concerning him, although they did not dream that he had deliberately borne false witness against his former friend, but they thought his rectitude was of that nature and tenuity to be judiciously fortified, and many were the lectures unceasingly dinned into his unwilling ears on the evils of lying, and the hard fate of the liar both in this world and the next. Knowing as he did that he had already deeply involved himself, these were hard things to hear, and under the menace of the open word and the secret thought Pete fell away till his contour no longer resembled the Bologna sausage as of yore! He lay awake at night and he wept much behind the stove during the day. He almost felt that if he had another chance he would actually tell the truth! Second chances, however, are rare in this world, and the inexorable law, in particular, holds out few opportunities for changing one's mind. His father and mother and grandfather were afraid to trust him out of their sight, not knowing what he might be at. Under the circumstances they could not say that he had done aught that was implicating, but they knew Pete of old and would hardly have been surprised at any development which would involve him and release Ned from the trouble. They berated Ned, notwithstanding, without limit, citing what he must have been to reach at last the fate at hand for him now. And so deceitful! they would exclaim in horror.

"Ned seemed lots more reliable than our Petey! At a pinch I'd ruther have trusted Ned in the cake-shop than Petey," Mrs. Bateman would declare.

"I wouldn't trust Pete there nohow,--without he wore a muzzle!" said Pete's grandfather, who was the proprietor of a little bakery, and Pete was not so fat for nothing!

He had not the heart now to purloin so much as a macaroon. No murderer ever dreaded an encounter with the ghost of the defunct victim more quailingly than Pete feared meeting Ned. He lived too in absolute terror of the junior "typos" and galley-boys, who he fancied had entered into a conspiracy to decoy him out and thrash him by way of partisanship for Ned, for now and again Pete contemplated the unvarnished truth and was for the nonce oblivious of the fact that only his own guilty conscience and Ned were aware that he had sworn falsely and maliciously in the effort to compass the ruin of his friend. So often, however, did some fellow employee of Ned's come to the shop that it might well warrant Pete's conclusion. He had persuaded his grandfather to let him "tend shop" as a subterfuge to keep him indoors and protect him from the chance encounter he feared. He had made the most sacred promises in regard to devouring the stock, for Pete's capacities in this line were formidable, and so far he had kept his pledge, for his appetite had vanished. "I'd ruther ye had teeth like mine," his grandfather had said, showing an eight-dollar set in a grin, "for then ye could hypothecate 'em, and with that security in the safe I'd feel more sure o' ye!" But Pete had begun to repent of his bargain, now that the curiosity of the composing-room had turned in his direction. He could sometimes have screamed with affright when the little bell on the door of the cake-shop tinkled as it opened, announcing an entrance, and, sent from the back room to wait on the customer, he would behold on the other side of the counter the round, rosy face and preternaturally sharp, alert eyes of one of the cub-printers. But for the counter between them Pete could not have stood his ground. The junior employees of the paper developed a taste for tarts that must have wrought stomachic havoc and financial wreck. In these crucial interviews the vacillating gourmand invariably found it difficult to determine exactly what it was that he wanted to eat.

"Cream-puffs,--have you heard anything more about the fire?"

"Naw! an' don't wanter!" replies Pete.

"Not _those_,--some with chocolate a-top. Who do _you_ think set the theatre afire?"

"Dunno! Chocolate ain't never on cream-puffs, nohow."

"Well--what's _that_ then? Do you think that Ned knows who burnt it?"

"I dunno nuthin' 'bout Ned! _Them?_ just plain chocolate cake."

"Well--you swore to lots about Ned, considering you don't 'know nothing' about him. I wonder he doesn't thrash you!"

"He dassent!" cries Pete tumultuously.

Whereupon the cub holds up his chin and looks critically over the counter at Pete, who sidles back and forth under this menacing gaze, and wonders if the cub can jump over the counter, and if anybody--grandpa, even "mommer"--is within call!

"Why don't you thrash Ned, then! They tell me he called you a liar in open court! And he is a small boy."

Pete begins to nod his head menacingly. "He'll git somethin' worse'n the lie when his trial comes off!"

"Where did he ever know the men who bailed him, anyhow?"

"In the theayter, mebbe,--they all burnt it together!" retorts Pete hardily.

"_Look-a-here!_ you seem to know a _deal_, my hearty! More than is healthy!" declares the cub, with the affectation of a long, speculative look, which wilts Pete.

"Oh, take your cake an' go along!" exclaims Pete. "I ain't goin' to talk no mo'!"

"Just like Ned! He doesn't talk any nowadays. For the same reason, I reckon. Might tell too much!"

"Oh, take your cake an' go!" screams Pete in desperation.

"Where is it? Oh, on the counter; well,--is _that_ coffee cake or currant bun? One thing is certain--there will be a reporter at the trial!" the cub-printer adds with a menacing inflection, as one should say, "The judgment day is a-coming along!"

Under this stress Pete tries to rally, realizing that he is even now metaphorically face to face with the public. "Must I wrap up the coffee cake?" with a smile that would be an appropriate concomitant of a raging toothache.

"About as well as anything," and with a look indicative of the boxer latent in every man and a disposition to trounce Pete, which with difficulty he holds in leash, the cub-printer goes his way to his fellows of the composing-room and reports no progress.

Again and again scenes almost exactly similar to this took place, with only a change as to the identity of Pete's interlocutor, and as often he pleaded with his parents to be released from the duties he had been so anxious to assume in "tendin' shop." But they believed, and not without reason, that the street awaited Pete's idle time and there mischief lurked, and thus with his gnawing conscience and his miserable fears and his sadly jocose martyrdom he counted the days, and repented of the past, and dreaded the future, and kept a lively and anxious lookout for Ned!

He was but secondary indeed in Ned's consideration. Ned did not even ask what transpired in the visits which he knew the galley-boys and printer-cubs made to the Bateman shop, when they returned, without news indeed, but munching their purchases from paper bags with the name of the elder Bateman printed thereon. Why should they go? What discovery could the elder printers anticipate in sending them on these bootless errands? The attitude of mind of the printers seemed to him the more formidable because he knew it was shared in the editorial rooms, where, however, all its manifestations were carefully cloaked from him. Yet he often noted indicia which convinced him that the suspicions of the editorial force were by no means allayed. He could not divine these suspicions nor whom they concerned. He grew more alarmed, and a conversation which chanced to come to his ears one day occasioned him much troubled meditation.

He was going into the "rinktum" of the editor-in-chief for copy. The door stood slightly ajar. He made no noise and for some moments his entrance was unnoticed. The crack reporter of the paper in a mysterious undertone was detailing something about the burned theatre to the editor-in-chief. There were present other editors of the various departments. Their faces all wore that excited, absorbed look which Ned had noticed whenever the name of Gorham was mentioned. One hasty scribe, in leaving off writing to come to listen, had thrust his pen behind his ear with an eager awkwardness that left a smear upward from the eyebrow and gave him an unwonted Mephistophelian aspect.

"Gorham says he is not going to rebuild his theatre," continued the reporter.

The ensuing silence had all the effect of an interrogation point.

"Says he is going to build stores only, strictly commercial purposes," pursued the interviewer.

There was a murmur of surprise, which could not, however, be construed as an interruption.

"He said he had concluded to go out of the theatrical business,--he had got sick of it; I asked why, and--and"--The young man broke into a laugh of mingled scorn and enjoyment. It was expressive, but clogged utterance.

"Why?" demanded the coterie in chorus.

"His mother was a Methodist," exclaimed the young sprig with another burst of hilarity.

A moment of dumb amazement.

"Has he just found that out?" asked the editor at last.

The writer who had smeared his face with ink accented its effect with a sneer. "Just found it out when he has gotten rid of a ruinous piece of property, converted into a splendid commercial building site, and with his pockets full of spot cash, his insurance."

"Ah, but his pockets are not full of cash," said the interviewer. "I was just coming to that. The insurance companies haven't as yet ponied up. They have paid nothing. They seem 'rather slow,' he said. He supposes there must be 'a little hitch' somewhere,--it is a large sum with each company,--but he expects it presently. That is what he said. Upon my word I can't make him out. He told it all as innocently as a baby."

Ned could not make them out. He hardly felt that he understood the language in which they spoke, so little meaning did their words convey to him. He puzzled over this conversation often, but without result.

He encountered this spirit even at the foreman's house, where formerly he had loved to go. When he had first been employed at the office the foreman had chanced to send him to his dwelling for some forgotten article, and Bob Platt, who was a breezy, jovial soul and keenly relished a jest or quip with scant regard to its point or quality, if but it was merry, found much enjoyment in the account which he received of the country child's first encounter with a parrot, an honored member of the Platt household. Thereafter he encouraged Ned's presence there that he might himself have a laugh at the boy's overpowering astonishment at the loquacious accomplishments of the bird and his simple-minded horror of its profanity.

"You see I ought to have sent it to Sunday-school when it was young!" Bob Platt seriously explained, and the new importation from the backwoods believed this at the time, as he would then have believed anything that Bob Platt chose to tell him, especially about that _lusus naturæ_, a bird that could talk and swear!

Later he came to know Bob Platt as "a mighty kind man, but will have his joke!" This just appraisement was brought about chiefly through Mrs. Platt's interference to prevent the devil from being "bedeviled" beyond the point of comfort and good-nature. She would not permit his mystification about city ways and his implicit reliance on the gay fables invented by Bob Platt, which Ned would have accepted as if they were gospel truth.

"Don't let him humbug you, Eddy!" she would interrupt warningly, at the very crisis of the fun.

For Bob Platt was by no means "boss" at home! His ascendency ceased at the threshold of the composing-room. Mrs. Platt gave Ned good, sound information and admonition to counteract the wondrous stories of the foreman, which the credulous boy was prepared to swallow whole coming from that source, so great was his confidence in Bob Platt, and to say truth his serious-minded wife spoiled many a good and harmless joke.

Mrs. Platt gradually became a genuine partisan of the lad. His kindly disposition was early appreciated by her. Indeed, only the day after he had first been sent there he had stopped on his way down town, for her neat home lay in a quiet cul-de-sac, with half a dozen other pretty cottages, opening off a genteel street between the dreary tenement region where he lived and the business portion of the city. After a neighborly country fashion he wanted to know if she had any "yerrands" which he might do for her on his way back, "bein' as you ain't got no boys, an' nothin' but girls," he explained sympathetically and with an expression of genuine pity.

Despite her intolerance of jokes at his expense Mrs. Platt thought his commiseration very funny, but she had her own reasons to feel deeply the lad's simple effort at courtesy and proffer of kind offices. Her heart was the more tender in the knowledge that she had not long to live. A persistent bronchial affection, with which she had warred for years, which had kept them poor, devouring money and care and time like some veritable monster, had, still unappeased, developed into consumption, now so unmistakable that even Bob Platt's laugh was often petrified on his jovial face by the perception of the fierce and ghastly fate that stood awaiting his household in the near future. She accepted Ned's politeness in the spirit in which it had been offered, and sometimes made him proud and pleased in executing some trifling commission. He came at last to be more genuinely useful, and often was intrusted with the escort of the four small girls of the family to the Sunday-school; and by this means Mrs. Platt got in some missionary work, for at that Sunday-school Ned heard of many comfortable things his spirit had not known before.

The four Platt girls had also some secular pleasures in which he participated, and the chief of these was called by them "viewin' the percession!" Never was there a muster of militia or a parade of firemen or a wonderful exhibition of bicyclists through the streets that they were not present to see. Whenever the exaction of the payment of some grotesque election bet set the community agog over the spectacle of one commercial magnate propelling another in a wheelbarrow through the principal thoroughfares, preceded by a band of music, and with all the teeth of the town a-grin in evidence of relish, the keenest cackle of callow laughter came from the four Platts and their attendant printer's devil. Never a circus tent was pitched and the elephant made the tour of the town that Ned, with each hand held tight by the smaller girls while the two elder followed close behind within clutch of his protective jacket, did not hie himself with his charges to some coigne of vantage particularly adapted to joyously see all that there was to be seen. It was always Mrs. Platt who thanked the boy, but it was Bob who owed him special gratitude on these occasions, for but for this substitute he must needs have played squire of dames himself, for the Platt girls would take no denial, and their father had long ago lost a living interest in elephants.

Nowadays, however, Ned was aware that it was Bob Platt himself who took special note of him whenever he chanced to appear at the house, far more rarely though it was than heretofore; for the boy was both proud and sensitive, and he feared lest some allusion to his arrest and that terrible day behind the bars escape these friends of happier times.

"I want to set Ned to talking," Platt would urge when his wife would object to his interference with the lad.

"No! you get no 'scoops' here!" she would declare. For she believed that Bob Platt would not spare his grandmother had the ancient dame been capable of furnishing the paper with a genuine "scoop."

She had herself earnestly remonstrated with Ned and urged him to make a clean breast of the whole affair, and she believed faithfully that the boy had been terrorized into silence rather than was guilty of crime. When he resisted her arguments by simply maintaining a dumb persistence, she felt it was the part of wisdom to torment him no more. "Give him a chance to recover his spirits and his confidence in people! His whole life is at stake, and he shan't be scooped just for the paper!"

But she could not prevent the parrot from calling "Fi-ah! Fi-ah! Fi-ah!" as it often did, nor hinder Ned's guilty start at the sound. It would suddenly rouse him from his reverie, when he sat on the steps of the little side porch where the parrot's cage hung in a honeysuckle vine, and Bob Platt would mark the demonstration with an unconsciously knowing look as he smoked his pipe beneath the flowering tendrils.

The parrot had no sinister intention in the matter. The call was only one of its mimetic accomplishments acquired by much repetition, for there was an engine-house only a block away, and the bird had been accustomed to this shrill alarm for years.

Often Ned had been to this engine-house when the men were at their drill, and he generally escorted the four Platt girls, who could not squeal loud enough nor shrill enough to express their admiration,--not of the splendidly efficient men, swinging down so quickly into place, all equipped and ready in one swift moment as it seemed, but of the horses and their preternatural wisdom in taking up their proper position of their own initiative, without a word of command, at the familiar signal. Of these horses, the favorite was "John Smith," an ancient warrior indeed, who had fought fire many a year before any of the Platt girls were born! Superannuated in fact he was, and had been sold to a dairyman. He himself declined the transfer, and came back to the engine-house at every alarm in the district, scattering the cans from the wagon as he galloped till the streets seemed to be flowing with milk and honey. His loyalty carried the day and he was easily repurchased, the milkman declaring he must give up either the horse or the dairy. At each drill the Platt girls sued for permission to pat the triumphant animal, albeit he took no more notice of their little rosy paws than of so many apple-blossoms. This had always been an enjoyable occasion to Ned, who also admired deeply the veteran "John Smith;" but now he declined to go with the girls.

"I want to see an' hear no more about a fire while I live!" he declared doggedly.

"Fi-ah! Fi-ah! Fi-ah!" clamored Poll, catching at the word, fluttering her green and gold wings, and turning her head, with its crooked beak, downward while she held on to her perch with her hooking claws.

Ned winced anew at the sharp cry, and Bob Platt looked significantly at his wife. "_Try_ him!" the look said openly. "_You_ can get something out of him!"

But it was needless for Ned to brace himself for resistance. Mrs. Platt would not interfere. Her kindness to him was not diminished even after she had been to see his mother for the first time and had experienced a cold reception. She had heard from Ned in the early days of her acquaintance with the boy that his mother held aloof from strangers, and she had approved of this trait in the simple country woman transplanted to a new sphere, and said that she thought the better of Mrs. Macdonald for it. Perhaps she did not expect this reserve in her turn, when she went to urge the brightest view, and counsel hope and cheerfulness, and adduce reasons to believe that all the disaster would be finally explained and smoothed away. She thought, however, that the attitude of Ned's mother was not unnatural, and that her experience was not calculated to foster much confidence in city people and city ways.

Despite Mrs. Platt's caution and resolve to report, as it were, naught of the details of her visit, Bob Platt contrived to ascertain from his wife the fact that Ned's mother knew no more than they did of the whole strange affair, that Ned had kept his own counsel, and that she had evidently never before heard the names of the two men who had given bail for his appearance at the next term of the Criminal Court, and thus released him from jail.

All this served to increase the strength of the foreman's suspicions. Ned grew conscious of this accession of wonder and doubt that began to envelop him like a veritable atmosphere. So strong were these suspicions that they began to take on the quality of a grim certainty and definite menace. He was aware that they concerned others even more than himself, but who and how he could not for his life divine. He often went over in his mind the details of all the conversations he had heard; he recapitulated the impressions made upon him by gestures, significant glances, all the indicia of unexpressed sentiment, and strove to deduce the meaning of it all and its effect on the future. But these speculations at last availed naught, and as the time for his trial approached the recollection was displaced by his anxiety on his own account, and the deep despondency which the sight of his mother's distress induced in him.

One evening--the long lingering summer twilight still lay upon the roofs and spires--he strolled into the composing-room. It was quite deserted,--a gas-jet here and there, burning dim and low, only accented the gloom. Through the open window he could hear the gay chorus of an opera _al fresco_ in a neighboring beer-garden. In emulation, perhaps, a mocking-bird in a cage in a barber-shop below mounted his perch and filled the gas-lit atmosphere, redolent of bay rum and eau de cologne, with his soft ecstatic roundelay. Ned soon tired of looking out of the window. He had not read at all of late; he had been so absorbed by his troubles that he had not cared to keep posted with the times. As to self-education, of which he had once been so ambitious, he asked himself bitterly what was the use of education to a boy who might spend years and years--the best years of his life--behind the bars.

This evening, however, the old craving came back to him in a measure. He stood irresolute for a moment. Then he turned to the case near by. He was not very expert in deciphering written characters. He often sought by practice to remedy this deficiency. He found generally ample exercise for this inability in the crabbed chirography of the editor-in-chief. Now as he turned up the gas he recognized the august scrawl of that magnate in the "copy" perched above the case.

The next instant his heart gave a great bound. His blood rushed to his head, beating tumultuously for a moment; then it receded, leaving him pale and dizzy, and feeling as if he were likely to faint.

For he saw written there the name of the manager-owner of the theatre, coupled with an odious accusation of burning the building, which no one could know so well as Ned was odiously false.

Ned now learned for the first time that the hot-headed Gorham had taken offense at some expressions in relation to the affair which the paper, surcharged with its grave suspicions, had inadvertently let fall. He had construed this as a reflection upon himself. Arrogant in his innocence, he had published a card--somewhat braggadocio in its tone, it must be confessed--in which he defied the editor to speak out his suspicions plainly, or be branded forever as a coward and a calumniator.

It was the editor's reply which Ned had chanced upon. The newspaper, through its many resources of procuring information, had learned that the insurance companies were on the point of formally refusing to make good the loss on the score of fraud; legal proceedings would doubtless be instituted on both sides. The time for the paper's "scoop" had arrived opportunely with the moment when it was necessary for the editor to answer the allegations against himself.

He had spoken, therefore, and spoken to the point. It had made a very disastrous showing for the owner, although the editor avoided distinct averments. He permitted it to be seen that the manager had given cause for the strongest inferences against him, even to the extent that he had procured the destruction of his own theatre for the sake of securing the money for which it was insured. The point that struck Ned's attention chiefly was the declaration that the boy who had been accused of complicity in the crime and arrested had been bailed by parties who were total strangers to the prisoner and all his friends. When interviewed, one of these sureties, a well-known broker, had given the most casual answers, excusing himself by reason of a flurry in certain stocks in which his customers were largely interested, and which absorbed his attention. The other bondsman, a brother of the broker, admitted frankly and boldly that he had never seen the boy till he went on his bond, and "wouldn't know him now from a gate-post;" and although he and his brother had acted entirely on their own responsibility in the matter and would make good the bond should the boy forfeit the bail, they undertook the liability solely to oblige Mr. Gorham, their close friend, who did not desire to keep so young a lad imprisoned so long a time, while there was still doubt of his guilt, and who had even offered to stand in behind them and pay the money himself should the boy give them the slip. Thus, the editor argued, Mr. Gorham played the double part of prosecutor and in effect bondsman for the prisoner.

Ned's hand shook. So it was to Manager Gorham he was indebted for his liberty. He could not for his life imagine why Gorham had come to his relief. But he was sharp enough to see, when it had been put before the mind in this plain way, that most outsiders would take the same view of it that the editor did; it was evidently the journal's opinion that the manager feared that the boy, if refused bail, would speak out and accuse him of himself burning or procuring the destruction of the building. The editor concluded, perhaps by way of vindicating his own courage and "taking the dare," by advising the insurance companies to pay nothing till their investigations should have been pushed in this direction, and he recommended the owner of the theatre to the kind attention of the grand jury and the attorney for the State.

Ned, in an agony of remorse and anxiety, clung to the case, almost overpowered by the realization how evil a thing concealment is, and what ruin it had wrought here. The incendiaries, he reflected, had doubtless made their escape in this long interval. He and his fears and his groundless reasoning were responsible for that,--for more!--for the blasting of an honest man's character and the wreck of his fortune, for the insurance companies would pay naught! It seemed a grotesque libel on likelihood, but the manager might even be arrested, tried, and serve a long term in the penitentiary, charged with burning his own house to defraud the insurance companies, because of the wickedness of a gang of knaves and a foolish boy's folly.

Ned grew more and more alarmed as he read again and again those strong logical statements that would forever blast the man who had befriended him at his utmost need, for the paper was a power in the land, and the editor's word weighed with all sorts of people. Ned might now have confessed all,--he thought of this once. The habit of concealment, however, does not give way readily. It yields only after the exhaustion of its uttermost resources. He asked himself who would now believe him? He was already accounted a mere tool and accomplice, and his puny efforts to whitewash such smirches as those intricate blots and tangles of loop-letters had put upon the manager's name would be ludicrously futile. He felt that he could measure the incredulity of the public.

He could measure, too, its credulity, alack, when all the town would read to-morrow the editor's reply!

The town never read it!

In a paroxysm of rage and fear Ned suddenly clutched the sheet and thrust it into the gas-jet. The blaze leaped up. Distinct shadows started forth from the murky glooms. The motion alarmed him. He glanced fearfully over his shoulder. He was still quaking at his own deed when the "copy" fell, a cinder. But perhaps his purpose was not yet served, he argued, for the article might have been set up. He looked at the imposing stone. The type was all ready, and in the chase,--the proof had been taken,--the revised smirched sheets lay hard by, all bearing the cabalistic sign O.K., the fiat of the press reader.

"They won't look at it again before the form is locked and goes to press," Ned said tremulously, for an audacious new idea had flashed into his mind. The article had compactly filled one third of a column. He swept the types of this space from the stone and replaced them at random in the boxes. Then selecting a larger variety, he began some of the fastest type-setting ever done in that composing-room. For copy he had gotten hold of a new prospectus of the paper, which was still in manuscript. Judiciously leaded he thought it might fill the blank space, and this substitute for the article which he had done away with he judged was innocent enough. He worked on hard and desperately,--he did not know how long.

At length he was slipping the last "stick" off upon the galley; he hastily shunted the type from the galley to the stone in the space that the obnoxious editorial had occupied; he readjusted the "furniture" by a stroke of luck, as it were, and turning away to the window he perched himself upon the sill and gazed demurely at the moon as a step upon the stairs announced an approach.