“Show me what?”
“What I’m going to show you,” he said, not very lucidly. “You can still set type, can’t you?”
“Sure. Why?”
“Come on, then,” he said firmly. “You’re a Linotype technician, and besides you got me into this.”
“Into what?”
“Into this,” he said, and wouldn’t tell me a thing more until we got there. Then he rummaged in all pigeonholes of his desk and pulled out a piece of dead copy and gave it to me.
His face had a kind of wistful look. Walter,” he said, “maybe I’m nuts, and I want to find out. I guess running a local paper for twenty-two years and doing all the work myself and trying to please everybody is enough to get a man off his rocker, but I want to find out.”
I looked at him, and I looked at the copy sheet he’d handed to me. It was just an ordinary sheet of foolscap and it was in handwriting that I recognized as that of Hank Rogg, the hardware merchant over at Hales Corners who sends in items from there. There were the usual misspellings one would expect from Hank, but the item itself wasn’t news to me. It read: “The weding of H.M. Klaflin and Miss Margorie Burke took place yesterday evening at the home of the bride. The bridesmades were—”
I quit reading and looked up at George and wondered what he was getting at. I said, “So what? This was two days ago, and I attended the wedding myself. There’s nothing funny about—”
“Listen, Walter,” he said, “set that for me, will you? Go over and sit down at the Linotype and set that whole thing. It won’t run over ten or twelve lines.”