“I’m sure I wrote it right!” To think she had brought all this on Tim.
“But you couldn’t have, Jo,” he insisted.
“I’ll hunt up the copy for you, Tim,” offered Chub. This was often part of his duties.
Joan went with him. They went up to the high stool, before a tall, flat table, where Dummy read yards and yards of proof every day. It was such a nuisance having to write everything out to him. He directed them to the big copy hook where used copy was kept for alibis. Joan fumbled through the sheets and found the story. It had “Martin” up in the left-hand corner, the way Tim marked all his copy. The story started, “Albert Johnson of North Market Street.”
“Why, it’s written wrong!” she gasped. Her eyes fell on Dummy’s bowed gray head. He gave a start as he bent over his pad, wrote something, and held it out to her. “That’s the way the copy came to me,” she read.
It was certainly a mystery how she could write one thing, and it could be changed into something different. There was nothing to be gained by scribbling notes to the Dummy, and so Joan and Chub filed back.
Tim was glummer than ever when she told him the news. “You must have written it that way, without realizing,” he said. “We’ve asked Mack, and he says it came to him that way.” He bent over his typewriter and banged away. He was doing rewrites now.
“Much as we all like you, Tim, we can’t let any mistakes like this happen,” the editor said. “I’m responsible for everything in the paper, and if anything gets in wrong, I have to discover who’s the guilty party and get rid of him.”
Joan and Chub crept away to the open back window, perched themselves on the broad sill, with their legs outside.
“I bet that Dummy’s like Dumb Dora in the comic strip, ‘She ain’t so dumb,’” remarked Chub. “There’s something queer about him. I’ve always said so. And there’s been queer things going on. You know what I told you about the mysterious mistakes. They’ve been happening before Tim got on the paper. But I couldn’t prove who made ’em. Now, I’m sure it’s Dummy.”