what might have been an impertinent intrusion on his privacy by some
practical-joking adult, for he knew there was no child in the house.
His room was kept in order by the wife of the night watchman employed
by the bank, and no one else had a right of access to it. But the woman
might have brought a child there and not noticed its disposal of its
plaything. He smiled. It might have been worse! It might have been a
real baby!
The idea tickled him with a promise of future "copy"--of a story with
farcical complications, or even a dramatic ending, in which the baby,
adopted by him, should turn out to be somebody's stolen offspring. He
lifted the little image that had suggested these fancies, carefully laid
it on his table, went to bed, and presently forgot it all in slumber.
In the morning his good-humor and interest in it revived to the extent
of writing on a slip of paper, "Good-morning! Thank you--I've slept very
well," putting the slip in the doll's jointed arms, and leaving it in a
sitting posture outside his door when he left his room. When he returned
late at night it was gone.
But it so chanced that, a few days later, owing to press of work on the
"Informer," he was obliged to forego his usual Sunday holiday out of
town, and that morning found him, while the bells were ringing for
church, in his room with a pile of manuscript and proof before him.
For these were troublous days in San Francisco; the great Vigilance
Committee of '56 was in session, and the offices of the daily papers
were thronged with eager seekers of news. Such affairs, indeed, were not
in the functions of the assistant editor, nor exactly to his taste; he
was neither a partisan of the so-called Law and Order Party, nor yet
an enthusiastic admirer of the citizen Revolutionists known as the
Vigilance Committee, both extremes being incompatible with his habits of
thought. Consequently he was not displeased at this opportunity of doing
his work away from the office and the "heady talk" of controversy.
He worked on until the bells ceased and a more than Sabbath stillness
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