“Yes, but how did you get the check?” Joan asked Eric.
“Well, it’s funny,” he drawled. Did he talk slowly, naturally, or was he trying to infuriate Abie? Eric was such an odd boy, you never could be sure about him. “I didn’t want the tickets, but it seems that the other boy did. I was certainly surprised to have a voice over the phone ask me if I wanted to sell the tickets and passes for twenty-five dollars. It was Jimmy. I told him I’d give them to him. But he insisted that we swap prizes. I did it, because I wanted the violin so much. It hardly seemed right, but Jimmy said my letter was better than his.”
“It was,” Joan admitted. “But I gave the money prize, to him, because he was—poor.”
“I don’t care anything about baseball,” Eric stated. “I wouldn’t dare play ball, for fear I’d break my finger and couldn’t play the violin. Professor Hofman says my fingers are—are precious.” He almost whispered the last word.
He wasn’t a sissy, only a genius. What if her decision had kept him from fulfilling his ambition? She could sympathize with him, for didn’t she want to be a newspaper reporter, while Mother thought it unladylike? She had put a stumblingblock in his way when she had decided the prizes, thinking he did not need money.
“So I took the check,” Eric continued, “since Jimmy said he didn’t need it and would much rather have the tickets. We met at the bank, and the man there explained how Jimmy was to write payable to me on it. And I wrote ‘Payable to Abie Goldstein’ on it and brought it here. We didn’t show the check to any one there; just asked. I didn’t notice it then, and when I got here, there was no signature. Jimmy hadn’t mentioned anything about it.”
“He’s been coming in here, looking at that violin, two, t’ree times every week for long time,” nodded Abie. “To-day, he say he take it. I think it lot money for him to have, but he look rich, and I give it him. Then he give me check not signed. I not so dumb as I look, maybe! I tell him I put him in jail for that! I call Mr. Martin at the Journal, like he say—and you come.”
He seemed to consider her a poor substitute. She remembered now that Abie had shouted something about putting some one in jail when she had talked to him over the telephone. She did not doubt but that the irate little man would do something awful to Eric if he could not prove his innocence. To think how she had misjudged Eric. She must help him now, for in a way, it was through her that he was in this mix-up. It was certainly a mystery, though. How could a check be signed one day and unsigned the next? Even Dummy could hardly do such a thing.
It was clear that she must do two things. She must get hold of Jimmy, somehow, to prove that Eric’s story was true, and then get Uncle John to untangle the knotty problem of the signature. She went back of the counter to Abie’s phone. It was on the wall. She had to tilt the mouthpiece down and then stand on tiptoe. Joan doubted whether Jimmy had a telephone and when Information Operator assured her he did not, she asked for the nearest one. Miss Betty often did that. The telephone next door proved to be that of a Mrs. Kelly who was willing to send one of her children over to deliver a message to Jimmy Kennedy. “Tell him to come to the Journal office as quickly as possible,” Joan told her. “It’s important.”
“Sure and he’ll be there quick as you like,” came Mrs. Kelly’s answer. “He’ll likely use his bike and he’s fast as the wind on that.”