Every morning during the past week since Tim had become a reporter on the Evening Journal, he had managed to slip out of the house before Joan was up and around. But this morning he wasn’t so far ahead of her but that she could catch up with him. Perhaps her chance had come. She’d go with him this morning to see what having a beat was like.
She sat down on the edge of a chair, and poured most of the contents of the cream pitcher into her cup of cocoa to make it cool enough to swallow in a gulp or two. Then she reached for a crumbly, sugary slice of coffee cake.
“No cereal, thanks. I’m in a hurry.” Joan started for the door, the coffee cake in one hand. At her mother’s look, she added, “I’ll eat an extra egg at lunch to make up the calories, but I must go now.”
She dashed out.
What luck! Tim was just coming out of the front door of the Journal office when she reached the sidewalk. She paused there, pretending to be absorbed in nibbling her cake, her eyes ostensibly fastened on the cracks in the sidewalk. The sidewalk was worth looking at—it was brick and the bricks were laid diagonally. It had been a game, when she was small, to walk with each step in a brick.
Tim mustn’t see her. He would accuse her of tagging, and he was cross enough with her as it was. For all week she had been offering bits of information, like, “Mrs. Redfern has had her dog clipped,” and asking, “Is that news, Tim?”
And Tim, harried with his new work, would snap out an answer in the negative. Poor Tim had already, as he often remarked, written up “battle, murder, and sudden death” since he had taken the job on the Journal.
He went on, now, up the slight slope of Market Street. Joan, slipping along as though headed for the Journal office, went too. At the Journal door, she paused and watched while Tim crossed through the traffic of Main Street and started on towards Gay Street. Block by block, or “square” as they say in Ohio, she trailed after, looking into the shop windows every now and then, lest he should turn around.
He kept right on, however—straight to the Plainfield railroad station, where he disappeared through the heavy doors. Joan, across the street, stopped in front of the Star office. Somehow, the Star office seemed almost palatial with its white steps and pillars, in contrast with the somewhat shabby Journal office. That was because the Star was a government newspaper, that is, a political man owned it. Tim had once said that about one third of the newspapers in the United States were owned by politicians. The Journal wasn’t, though.
But Joan wouldn’t have traded the Journal office for the shiny new one of the Star. She loved every worn board in the Journal floor, every bit of its old walls, plastered with pictures and old photographs.