fs, and, taking out the slip,
pointed to a marked paragraph. "The foreman says the reporter who
brought the news allows he got it straight first-hand! But ef you've
corrected it, he reckons you know best."

Breeze saw at a glance that the paragraph alluded to was not of his own
writing, but one of several news items furnished by reporters. These
had been "set up" in the same "galley," and consequently appeared in the
same proof-slip. He was about to say curtly that neither the matter nor
the correction was his, when something odd in the correction of the item
struck him. It read as follows:--

"It appears that the notorious 'Jim Bodine,' who is in hiding and
badly wanted by the Vigilance Committee, has been tempted lately into
a renewal of his old recklessness. He was seen in Sacramento Street the
other night by two separate witnesses, one of whom followed him, but he
escaped in some friendly doorway."

The words "in Sacramento Street" were stricken out and replaced by the
correction "on the Saucelito shore," and the words "friendly doorway"
were changed to "friendly dinghy." The correction was not his, nor the
handwriting, which was further disguised by being an imitation of print.
A strange idea seized him.

"Has any one seen these proofs since I left them at the office?"

"No, only the foreman, sir."

He remembered that he had left the proofs lying openly on his table
when he was called to the office at the stroke of the alarm bell; he
remembered the figure he saw gliding from his room on his return. She
had been there alone with the proofs; she only could have tampered with
them.

The evident object of the correction was to direct the public attention
from Sacramento Street to Saucelito, as the probable whereabouts of this
"Jimmy Bodine." The street below was Sacramento Street, the "friendly
doorway" might have been their own.

That she had some knowledge of this Bodine was not more improbable than
the ballet story. Her strange absences, the mystery surrounding her, all
seemed to testify that she had some connection--perhaps only an innocent
one--with these desperate people whom the Vigilance Committee were
hunting down. Her attempt to save the man was, after all, no more
illegal than their attempt to capture him. True, she might have trusted
him, Breeze, without this tampering with his papers; yet perhaps she
thought he was certain to discover it--and it was only a silent appeal
to his mercy. The correcti