“Sure,” agreed Joan, readily, and turned to the desk. It was a mess, truly, snowed in under pages of copy paper, clippings, photographs of babies and of brides, and proofs of pictures.
Joan loved tidying up when one could see the improvement like this. She began by sticking all Miss Betty’s notes on the big hook on the side of the desk, where she kept them for a week, and then threw them away, as did all the reporters. The photographs she gave to Chub to file in the tall green files, where they would be taken out when the blushing brides or proud mothers came in to claim them.
Then she was down to the desk top, and blew the dust off. A paper fluttered to the floor. Joan picked it up and could not help reading it—a note from Mack, about a social item that some one had left during Betty’s lunch hour. He had typed her a message about it, put down the phone number for her to call, and had added his name.
There was something awfully familiar about the typing. The capitals were all jumped halfway off the line. Why, so were they in that final paragraph in the fire story. She remembered, because since yesterday, she had been studying the idiosyncrasies of that last paragraph until she knew them by heart. But still she couldn’t be sure, without getting it to compare.
She rushed from the Journal office, and bounded home. Good thing she knew where she had left that story—under the scarf on her dresser. Back in the Journal office, she looked from the typed note to the last paragraph of the page in her hands, and then back again. Yes, both of them did have capitals halfway above the line.
And—she bent over it more closely and wished for a magnifying glass. Her heart thrilled as she looked over at Tim scowling into his machine—that was because Miss Betty and Mack were acting so chummy—and at Chub opening and closing the sliding drawers of the green files as he put the photographs in their proper places. Tim didn’t know she was saving him. Chub didn’t know she was about to solve the baffling mystery.
She bent closely—yes, it was the same, and the commas were all perfect ones, too. The final paragraph had no more been written on Tim’s machine than the note on Miss Betty’s desk.
There was a soft noise behind her and she jumped. It was Dummy clearing his throat and looking at her with his mild blue eyes.
“Have you that fire story, Miss Joan?” he asked in a hoarse whisper. “I didn’t get to see it, again, and I wanted to.”
Joan glanced up. It would do no harm to trust him. He did seem nice. Perhaps it was because he called her Miss Joan. “Look, Mr. Marat,” she said, and held up the two pieces of typing. “Who wrote these, would you say?”