Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 25, No. 2, August 13, 1927

The Argus-Enterprise is printed down in the basement of the plant on an old-fashioned flat-bed press and it was part of my duties to trundle the forms back up to the make-up room every evening before I went home, and then to come back after supper and wash and unlook the forms. This left them all ready to be “thrown in” early the next morning.

So the first thing I did after we got to the plant and I had lighted the fire under the big melting pot was to take off my coat and start in washing up the day’s forms. Huffy began on the same job, picking out the front page form to start on.

He was back at the other end of the room and I didn’t see exactly how it happened, but somehow he tried to slide the big heavy form of type across the stone an let it fall off. It made an awful racket and splintered a board in the floor, not to mention pieing all that type, and I was pretty sore. I ran back there to see what had happened and found Huffy down on his knees gathering up the scattered slugs, headline type, column rules, and so on.

“I’m sorry,” he said when I came up. “I’m just too nervous to work to-night, I guess.” I really pitied him, he seemed so cut up, and got down with him to help clean up the mess.

Some of the column rules and wooden “furniture” were bent and broken in the fall and I laid them to one side as we worked. “These,” I remarked, “will have to go to the hell-box, I suppose.”

Now there wasn’t anything in that remark to excite any one. A “hell-box” is just a big old packing case or chest of some sort where printers throw damaged type, broken wood, and such junk as that. It is off in an out of the way corner and gets cleaned out about every ten years.

I couldn’t see why Bert should get his back up so when I mentioned it, but as soon as the words left my mouth his face went dark and he grabbed me by the arm with a grip like a clamp.

“Don’t you go near that damn thing!” he snarled out. “I’ll take ’em back there myself!”

I told him that I hadn’t said anything about who was to take the stuff and that he was welcome to the job as far as I was concerned. But that didn’t seem to satisfy him, and he got up right then and there and grabbed the junk and headed for the back room.

As soon as he got through the door I went down the front stairway four steps at a time, and ran back through the lower floor, and came up the back stairs just as Bert got to the corner where the hell-box stood. His back was toward me and I hadn’t much trouble in sneaking over behind a halftone cabinet about five feet from the place where he was standing.

When I peeped around the corner I saw Bert down on his knees pawing over the stuff in the box. He seemed to be hunting something — something important. After a minute or two I heard him mumble something to himself and saw: him straighten up.

He must have had some kind of a hunch that he wasn’t alone just then, because he whirled all at once and peered down toward the door of the make-up room — I guess he noticed that I wasn’t making any noise down there. Anyhow, he started tiptoeing toward that door.

I held my breath and waited till he passed the spot where I was hiding, praying that he would give me time to get back to the front end the way I had come. As he passed me I saw that he was carrying in one hand a bunch of type slugs.

I was standing there shaking and asking myself how in the world that new type metal happened to be in with the junk when my elbow grazed a gasoline can and it fell to the floor with an awful clatter Huffy spun around like a mechanical doll, and before I could budge he was on top of me.

“You sneakin’ little spy,” he screamed, “I’ll teach you to butt into my business!” And he grabbed my shirt collar with his free hand and jerked me out in the middle of the floor.

I was too surprised to show any fight for a minute and before I knew it he had pulled me across to the door of the carriers’ room where the big vat of hot metal was bubbling away like pictures you’ve seen of the crater of a volcano. The glow from the fire lighted his face up till he looked like the Old Scratch himself.

His eyes were bulging out of their sockets and his lips were pressed together so close that they made a pinkish white line across his ugly face. It wasn’t till we got near the metal cooker that I began to realize that the man was crazy — crazy with anger.

“Just you wait till I get my other hand empty,” he yelled in my face, “and I’ll stick you head first into that kettle if it’s the last thing I do on this damned earth!” And I honestly believe he’d have done it too, if I’d given him about another minute.

III

It broke on me all at once that he was working over to the type vat to throw that handful of metal in so that he could use both fists on me, and just about then I got my ire up.

I’m pretty husky for my age — having made a living for mother and me with my two hands ever since dad left us six years ago — and before Huffy knew it he had all he could handle.