Pachs looked at it and couldn't take his eyes away: he was afraid he was going to be sick. The cover was not only good, it was good Caniff, just as the master might have drawn it himself. Yet the most horrible part was that it was Pachs' own cover, his own layout. Improved. He had never been what might be called a tremendous artist, but he wasn't a bad artist. He did all right in comics, and during the good years he was on top of the pack. But the field kept shrinking and when the machines came in it went bust. There was almost no spot for an artist now. Just a job here and there as sort of layout boy and machine minder. He had taken that — how many years now? — because old and dated as his work was he was still better than any machine that drew heads with a rubber stamp.
Not anymore. He could not even pretend to himself anymore that he was needed, or even useful.
The machine was better.
He realized then that he had been clenching his fists so tightly that his nails had sunk into the flesh of his palms. He opened and rubbed them together and noticed that they were shaking badly. The Mark IX was turned off and they were all gone: he could hear Miss Fink's machine takking away in the outer office. The little girl was telling Martin about the special supplies she would need to buy to operate the machine, and when Pachs closed the connecting door he cut off the grumbling reply about extra expenses not being mentioned.
Pachs warmed his fingers in his armpits until the worst of the tremors stopped. Then he carefully pinned a sheet of paper onto his drawing board and adjusted the light so it would not be in his eyes. With measured strokes he ruled out a standard comic page and separated it into six panels, making the sixth panel a big one, stretching the width of the page. He worked steadily at the penciling, stopping only once to stretch his back and walk over to the window and look out. Then he went back to the board and as the afternoon light faded he finished the inking. Very carefully he washed off his battered but still favorite Windsor & Newton brush and slipped it back into the spring holder.
There was a bustle in the outer office and it sounded like Miss Fink getting ready to leave, or maybe it was the new girl coming back with the supplies. In any case it was late, and he had to go now.
Quickly, before he could change his mind, he ran full tilt at the window, his weight bursting through the glass, and hurtled the twenty-three stories to the street below. Miss Fink heard the breaking glass and screamed, then screamed louder when she came into the room. Martin, complaining about the noise, followed her, but shut up when he saw what had happened. A bit of glass crunched under his shoes when he looked out the window. The doll-like figure of Pachs was visible in the center of the gathering crowd, sprawled from sidewalk to street and bent at an awful angle as it followed the step of the curb.
"Oh God, Mr. Martin, oh God look at this…" Miss Fink wailed.
Martin went and stood next to her in front of the drawing board and looked at the page still pinned there. It was neatly done, well drawn and carefully inked.
In the first panel was a self-portrait of Pachs working on a page, bent over this same drawing board. In the second panel he was sitting back and washing out his brush. In the third standing. In the fourth panel the artist stood before the window, nicely rendered in chiaroscuro with backlighting. Five was a forced perspective shot from above, down the vertical face of the building with the figure hurtling through the air towards the pavement below.
In the last panel, in clear and horrible detail, the old man was bent broken and bloody over the wrecked fender of the car that was parked there: the spectators looked on, horrified.
"Look at that will you," Martin said disgustedly, tapping the drawing with his thumb. "When he went out the window he missed the car by a good two yards. Didn't I always tell you he was no good at getting the details right?"
With ponderous smoothness the big Greyhound bus braked to a stop at the platform, and the door swung open. "Springville," the driver called out. "Last stop!" The passengers stirred in the aisle and climbed down the steps into the glare of the sun. Sam Morrison sat patiently, alone, on the wide rear seat, waiting until the last passengers were at the door before he put the cigar box under his arm, rose and followed them. The glare of sunlight blinded him after the tinted glass dimness of the bus, and the moist air held the breathless heat of Mississippi summer. Sam went carefully down the steps, one at a time, watching his feet, and wasn't aware of the man waiting there until something hard pushed at his stomach.
"What business yuh got in Springville, boy?"
