moving her heavy copper legs, in the fetid bed-warmth, with the slow noise of silk.
Harry Tugman lit a Camel, drawing the smoke deep into his powerful ink-stained lungs as he watched the press run down. His bare arms were heavy-muscled as his presses. He dropped comfortably into his pliant creaking chair and tilted back, casually scanning the warm pungent sheet. Luxurious smoke steamed slowly from his nostrils. He cast the sheet away.
“Christ!” he said. “What a makeup!”
Ben came down stairs, moody, scowling, and humped over toward the ice-box.
“For God’s sake, Mac,” he called out irritably to the Make-up Man, as he scowled under the lifted lid, “don’t you ever keep anything except root-beer and sour milk?”
“What do you want, for Christ’s sake?”
“I’d like to get a Coca-Cola once in a while. You know,” he said bitingly, “Old Man Candler down in Atlanta is still making it.”
Harry Tugman cast his cigarette away.
“They haven’t got the news up here yet, Ben,” said he. “You’ll have to wait till the excitement over Lee’s surrender has died down. Come on,” he said abruptly, getting up, “let’s go over to the Greasy Spoon.”
He thrust his big head down into the deep well of the sink, letting the lukewarm water sluice refreshingly over his broad neck and blue-white sallow night-time face, strong, tough, and humorous. He soaped his hands with thick slathering suds, his muscles twisting slowly like big snakes.
He sang in his powerful quartette baritone:
"Beware! Beware! Beware! Many brave hearts lie asleep in the deep, So beware! Bee-WARE!"
Comfortably they rested in the warm completed exhaustion of the quiet press-room: upstairs the offices, bathed in green-yellow light, sprawled like men relaxed after work. The boys had gone
