“Now look here!” said he, “there’s nothing to be gained talking that way.  Ye’ve got me—­I’ll give ye that!  But what do ye expect?—­eighty columns of type a night and niver a little harmless slip—?”

“You must be taught to make no slips with my articles.  I’m going to punish you for that—­”

“What-a-at!  Say that agin!”

“Stand out here—­I am going to give you a good thrashing.  I shall whip ...”

Another man would have laughed heartily and told the young man to trot away while the trotting was good.  He was nearly half a foot shorter than Mr. Pat, and his face advertised his unmartial customs.  But Mr. Pat had the swift fierce passions of his race; and it became to him an unendurable thing to be thus bearded by a little spectacled person in his own den.  He saw red; and out shot his good right arm.

The little Doctor proved a good sailer, but bad at making a landing.  His course was arched, smooth, and graceful, but when he stopped, he did it so bluntly that men working two stories below looked up to ask each other who was dead.  Typesetters left their machines and hurried up, fearing that here was a case for ambulance or undertaker.  But they saw the fallen editor pick himself up, with a face of stupefied wonder, and immediately start back toward the angry proof-reader.

Mr. Pat lowered redly on his threshhold.  “G’awn now!  Get away!”

Queed came to a halt a pace away and stood looking at him.

“G’awn, I tell ye!  I don’t want no more of your foolin’!”

The young man, arms hanging inoffensively by his side, stared at him with a curious fixity.

These tactics proved strangely disconcerting to Mr. Pat, obsessed as he was by a sudden sense of shame at having thumped so impotent an adversary.

“Leave me be, Mr. Queed.  I’m sorry I hit ye, and I niver would ‘a’ done it—­if ye hadn’t—­”

The man’s voice died away.  He became lost in a great wonder as to what under heaven this little Four-eyes meant by standing there and staring at him with that white and entirely unfrightened face.

Queed was, in fact, in the grip of a brand-new idea, an idea so sudden and staggering that it overwhelmed him.  He could not thrash Mr. Pat.  He could not thrash anybody.  Anybody in the world that desired could put gross insult upon his articles and go scot-free, the reason being that the father of these articles was a physical incompetent.

All his life young Mr. Queed had attended to his own business, kept quiet and avoided trouble.  This was his first fight, because it was the first time that anybody had publicly insulted his work.  In his whirling sunburst of indignation, he had somehow taken it for granted that he could punch the head of a proof-reader in much the same way that he punched the head off Smathers’s arguments.  Now he suddenly discovered his mistake, and the discovery was going hard with him.  Inside him there was