“The editor wants one,” Joan assured him. “There’s no time to get the staff photographer to take one.” She did not say that the Journal would probably not bother sending Lefty out to take a picture. He had more important ones to take. Besides, it was always cheaper to borrow a picture. “But I’m sure Lefty—that’s the photographer—can fix this up,” she went on. “He can change the collar to the kind you’re wearing now.”
“Can he, honest?” Joe was all eyes. “By magic?”
Mrs. Kennedy took the picture out of the frame for Joan, and she left to get back to the office. When the picture came out the next afternoon, Jimmy Kennedy was wearing a grown-up collar and a four-in-hand tie, instead of a Windsor. Joan had known Lefty could do anything. The big picture of Eric and the smaller one of Jimmy were the same size in the paper reproduction, and Jimmy’s looked just as nice as Eric’s, which had been taken by the town’s best photographer.
Tim wrote up a dandy story, too, from the data Joan could give him. “Gee, you saw enough to write a novel about it!” he said, as she reeled off the number of lamps, candlesticks, and clocks that graced the Reynolds home. “I’m glad it’s a boy story this time,” he smiled. “I sure got tired of writing up babies!”
The Journal sent the check to Jimmy and the game tickets to Eric. Joan was in Uncle John’s office when he signed the check, for it was not an ordinary check like the ones Burke made out for stamps and clean towels. It was a special check and had to be signed by Uncle John himself, with his odd, illegible scrawl, John W. Martin. He always made an old-fashioned M. He had to hunt around for fresh ink, as the inkwell on his desk was full of dry, black chunks. He found a bottle behind the books on the desk and used that.
Both boys promptly wrote in with brief, polite notes of thanks. Joan read them over when they were published in the Journal, each one a bare stick (two inches of print). They seemed too short and too polite. What was the trouble? They were not at all the frankly delighted, boyish notes that you would have expected Eric and Jimmy to write.
Two days later, Gertie appeared in the little hallway between that office and the editorial one. “A Jewish gentleman, very much out of temper, is demanding to speak to Mr. Martin,” she announced. Then she saw that Tim’s desk was vacant. “Isn’t the cub here?”
Joan looked up from the damp proof sheets of the society layout for Sunday. She was helping Miss Betty and was pasting the typed captions under the proper picture. She shook her head at Gertie, as she carefully pressed down on a strip of copy paper, bearing the title, “To be Married This Week.”
Gertie left, but reappeared in a flash. “Say, this gink won’t take no for an answer. Madder’n a hornet. Says he wants to talk to some one who knows something about those prizes the boys won.”
Joan forgot the brides and jumped up, grabbing a pad and pencil. She started to the nearest phone booth, knowing that Gertie would switch the call back to her. She clamped the head phones over her ears, and had her hands free to make notes. A tumult of quick Jewish phrases sounded in her ears. “Hey, you Mr. Martin, what you think this boy try pull trick like this?”