“Don’t you tell anybody, Mr. Payne,” interrupted Ruth, smiling, but firmly. “I am buying your secrecy as well as your edition of one copy.”
“I get you! I get you!” declared the old fellow. “This is to be on the q.t.?”
“Positively.”
“You sit right here. The front page is all made up on the stone, Marriages, Births, Death Notices, and all. I’ll set the paragraph and slip it in at the top o’ the column. My boy is out, but this young man can help me lift the page into the press. She’s all warmed up, and I was going to start printing when Edgar comes back from breakfast.”
He grabbed the piece of copy and went off into the printing room, chuckling. Half an hour later the first paper came from the press, and Ruth and Tom bent over it. The item the girl had written was plainly printed in the position she had chosen on the front page of the Harpoon.
“Now, you are to keep still about this,” Ruth said, threatening Mr. Payne with a raised finger.
“I don’t know a thing about it,” he promised, pocketing the bill she took from her purse, and in high good humor over the joke.
Tom helped him take the front page from the press again. The printer unlocked the chase, and removed and distributed the three lines he had set up at Ruth’s direction.
The crowd from Beach Plum Point came over in the cars about noontime. Aunt Kate had remained at the inn on this morning, and she and Ruth walked to the “location,” which was a beautiful old shaded front yard at the far end of the village.
Helen and Jennie had come with the real actors, and were to appear in the picture. The story related incidents at a Sunday-school picnic, and most of the comedy had already been filmed on the lot.