Next morning Peter awoke with a splitting headache. Toward noon it got much worse. He called Pat in from the next room. "I'm up against it," he told him. "I'm sick as a dog. Of course I could telegraph to the office and get them to send somebody down but I don't want to do that. This is your chance. You'll have to do the lead story. You say you can imitate me or parody me or whatever you call it. Now's the time to go to it. And say nobody has to know that I'm not doing it. Just sign your story 'by Peter Neale.'"
"I'll do my best," said Pat. Peter dozed off late that afternoon and the doze became a deep slumber. He did not wake until morning when there came a violent rapping on his door. In the hall was a messenger with a telegram. Peter opened it and read:
"What happened? We didn't get the story. Never mind telephoning explanations because I'm coming down over the week-end. I'll be at the hotel at one—Twice."
Pat was nowhere around the hotel and nobody seemed to know where he had gone. Peter was still mystified when Rufus Twice arrived. He thought at first of trying to conceal the fact that Pat had acted as his substitute and then decided not to. "It isn't fair to expect me to do as much as that," he thought. However he found that any such deception would have been useless.
"What happened to you?" was Twice's first question.
"I was sick. I had a blinding headache and I told Pat to do the story. Didn't he send anything?"
"Yes, but it might as well have been nothing. All we had to go by was the A. P. Dempsey cut loose yesterday and knocked Larry Williams down three times. The last time they had to carry him out of the ring. And our story was something about a man named Daredevil Oliver that's doing a high dive at an amusement park down here. It was signed Peter Neale but I knew it couldn't be you."
Twice picked some copy out of his pocket and flourished it in the air. "Lights. Gray mist. East wind," he read. "Good God! Peter, nobody can say I don't appreciate Walt Whitman or Amy Lowell, but I tell you Dempsey knocked Larry Williams down three times. The last time he was out clean as a whistle."
"You mean to say there wasn't any Peter Neale story in the paper?" asked Peter terrified.
"Yes, you get off all right. You don't suffer any. I did it myself. I rewrote the A. P. and signed your name. But it was just the merest chance that I happened to drop in at the office. You should have called me up and let me send a man down."