But Dummy, having been silent for so long a time, found it most agreeable to talk, and he drawled worse than ever.
“Well, I’ll begin at the beginning and tell you my right name.” The whole office force, Miss Betty, Mack, and Cookie, clustered around and Dummy waved them into the group. Chub ventured out from the front office, but Mr. Nixon motioned him to go back to his work. “It’s Richard Marat,” stated Dummy.
Mr. Nixon looked as though the name were slightly familiar, and he wrinkled up his nose a bit, trying to remember. But mostly he looked rather bored at Dummy. He seemed to think that the Journal family had had enough excitement for one day without all this disturbance coming up.
Cookie looked a bit puzzled over the name, but Mack and Miss Betty showed plainly that they had never heard of the name before, as far as they could remember.
Richard Marat! Richard Marat! The name began to burn in Joan’s mind. Why, it did sound familiar. She was sure she had heard it somewhere—and not so very long ago, either. There, she had it—! She remembered the “Ten Years Ago To-Day” story.
“Why, that’s the bookkeeper who had such a large deficit!”
Every one looked at her as though she were absolutely crazy, but Dummy leaped forward and took both her hands in his, and looked into her face.
“Just so, little maid,” he said, quaintly. “The first time I noticed you was when I heard you say, ‘My brother wrote that!’ the first day Tim was on the paper. I hoped then that he appreciated his sister’s great interest in him. And when I realized what an inquisitive little miss you were, I was actually scared that you’d somehow discover I was not a Dummy. But it’s to you, perhaps that I owe my good fortune, for you were the one to pick my story out of the files to reprint—but I mustn’t get ahead of my story. Yes, I am Richard Marat, the bookkeeper, who thought he had a deficit. I’ve always been a moody and impulsive sort of person, and when I discovered I had—or thought I had—such a great mistake in my books, I took the easiest way out, and ran away.”
“I remember that,” said Cookie. “It was just about ten years ago, I guess. But you didn’t have a mistake, after all.”
“That’s why he was so quick and accurate, because he was a bookkeeper,” Miss Betty whispered to Mack.