“Jones,” said his booming voice from somewhere far above me. “High-Pockets Jones, sometimes known as the Dean of Barnstormers.”
I leaned back to look up at him. His face was as weatherbeaten as his clothes. I recognized the reddish tan that comes from facing a hot wind on the top of a moving boxcar. He was obviously a bum, and probably wouldn’t be with us long, but there was something almost of nobility in his eyes—calmness, gentleness, or perhaps just the knowledge of having been in many, many situations and the experience gained from getting out of them, and the self-assurance that he would always be able to get out of any situation.
I reached up to shake hands. “Yes, I’ve heard of you,” I said. “You’re sort of a throwback to the days when they needed barnstormers to correct bad working-conditions, aren’t you?”
He chose to pass that remark, “I’ve heard of you, too,” he said, that last word sounding like the low string on a bull fiddle.
I laughed quickly but efficiently—shortly, I believe they call it. “Nothing good, I hope.”
High-Pockets Jones paused a moment before he answered: “Not bad, until lately.”
It took me a moment or two to realize what he had said. I bent back to look at his face. He was quite sober about it.
“Okay,” I said hastily. “I don’t want to keep you from your work.”
I worried a little about High-Pockets. I had heard a lot about him; he was a sort of mystery man in the printing business, going from place to place, wherever printers felt they were having trouble, and trying to straighten things out.
The stories about him indicated that he had some odd ways of doing that, based largely on a sort of legendary influence that he had over machinery. I remembered even the theory that all machinery was negatively charged with some sort of “personal” electricity, and that High-Pockets—having been hit by lightning—had a terrifically high charge of positive electricity of the same sort, which enabled him to do miraculous things on occasion with machinery—especially linecasting machines.
Well, I dismissed that as a bunch of talk, but what I didn’t quite like was the fact that High-Pockets traditionally appeared in places where he was needed to straighten out things for the men.
I went into conference with Dr. Hudson, and he agreed with me that we should go right ahead; but we’d keep an eye on High-Pockets Jones, and at the first sign of interference Mr. Jones would find himself in a great deal of trouble. I would even, I decided, stoop to having him thrown in jail on a phony charge, if that should be necessary.
By this time we had started on the Legal Printing Company job, and we went ahead with our next offensive. Mind-reading came first. Dr. Hudson installed a black box at the water-fountain, and he explained to the men what it was for. He had a private wire to his desk, and a transformer that turned the current from the box back into thoughts. It was quite efficient. Some of the thoughts we got the first day were vituperative, some were quite obscene, and some were pretty feeble, but that didn’t matter. It got the boys to worrying, and it saved us a bottle of spring water a day.
Then there was the installation of the lucite piping. Of course seeing in curves had been possible for years, but never on this scale. We piped lucite to every place where a man worked, and so we could throw a switch in the inner office and check on every man in the shop without their knowing it. That was a very clever device; it really put the men on the spot.
Once in a while, when I needed to relax, I would flip a switch and throw High-Pockets Jones’ machine on the screen. The smooth rhythm of those flowing hands was more soothing than a lullaby, especially because I knew how much type they were getting up.
Then we advanced to the third step in our strategy: having a man in two places at once.
Dr. Hudson finished making his cabinet filled with coils and transformers and condensers and circuits I’d never heard of, and we set it up in the composing-room one night.
It was that night that full realization hit me that we had set only two hundred galleys of type out of the two thousand on the Legal Printing Company job, and that there were only two weeks left to get it out. Somehow or other, I had let it slip by. I thought Dr. Hudson was watching those things; I had been busy trying to make an impression for the receivers.
I was sick when I figured it all out. We had six machines. If we should run those six machines two shifts a day, our capacity was about three hundred and sixty galleys a week. Into eighteen hundred that goes considerably more than two times. We would need five weeks of full production—and we couldn’t possibly give it full production; we had other jobs, too.
The only hope was Dr. Hudson’s new machine.
The next day the electricians hooked it up to a twelve-hundred-volt feed-line, and by noon it was ready to go. At twelve thirty, as soon as the men punched in, I called them together. This was on office time, of course, so there couldn’t be any squawk. Dr. Hudson was there to explain. I never had fully realized how much of him was nose before I watched him that day.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “this is nothing to be afraid of. This is merely a modern device to assure continuous production in the composing-room by eliminating lost time from sickness and accidents. As you know, if a linotype operator is ill, his machine goes untouched. That day’s production is lost. At a cost per man of around ten dollars an hour, that represents a considerable loss.”
He opened the cabinet and showed them a comfortable leather seat inside.
“There are two compartments
