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.