'I'll face them. I'll go down fighting. They shan't say I surrendered.'
He had never in his life felt anything like this jerky nervousness. A restlessness that wouldn't permit him so much as to sit down.
While in the _Gleaner_ office he had hardly been aware of McGibbon. He certainly hadn't listened to him.
But now, like a blow, everything McGibbon had said came to him. Every syllable. Suddenly he could see the man, towering ever him, pounding his desk. Talking--talking--full of fresh hopes while the world crumbled around him. More disaster! It was the buzzing song of the old globe as it spun endlessly on its axis. Disaster!... The advertisers had at last combined against the paper. Old Weston had called McGibbon's note. That must have taken about the last of Henry's thousand. They were broke.
His hand brushed his coat pocket. It bulged with copy paper. He must have thrust it back there absently, at the office.
It was curious; he seemed to see it as a printed page, with a title at the top, and his name. He couldn't see what the title was. Yet it was there, and it was good.
His restlessness grew. Again he walked round and round the room. There was a glow in his breast. Something that burned and fired his nerves and drove him as one is driven in a dream. Either he must rush outdoors and wander at a feverish pace around the town and up the lake shore--walk all night--or he must sit down and write.
He sat down. Picked up an atlas of Humphrey's and wrote on his lap. And he wrote, from the beginning, as he would have walked had he gone out, in a fever of energy, gripping the pencil tightly, holding his knees up a little, heels off the floor. The colour reappeared about his forehead and temples, then on his cheeks.
When Humphrey came in, after midnight, he was in just this posture, writing at a desperate rate. The floor all about him was strewn with sheets of paper. One or two had drifted off to the centre of the room. He didn't hear his friend come up the stairs.' When he saw him, standing, looking down, something puzzled, he cried out excitedly':--
Humphrey resisted the impulse to reply with a 'Don't what?'
'I am. I can't talk! Please--go away! Go to bed. You'll make me lose it!'