“That’s so, I nearly forgot about that,” one of the men exclaimed. “That was an old pocket-piece of mine. I gave it to her by mistake. I will give her a good one for it right away.”
“Here it is,” Larry remarked, producing the bad coin, and receiving a good one.
“Now that the excitement is over I guess we can go on making lead soldiers,” remarked the head workman, as he propped up the broken door and started the furnace.
“Yes, and we must get to work on the story,” the reporter said.
“I wonder if the other papers will have it in the morning,” came from Larry.
“Not much danger,” replied Mr. Newton. “Jones and Douglass will keep very quiet about it, since they were fooled.”
None of the morning sheets had an account of the affair, and that afternoon the Leader came out with a big display story, telling how the detectives, hoping for much credit from their performance, had planned to raid a counterfeiters’ den. Mr. Newton set forth in lively sentences how the officers had kept watch, and had, with a great show of authority, burst into the place, only to find that it was merely a temporary toy shop.
The story made a hit, and Mr. Emberg was warm in his praise of Mr. Newton and Larry as well. He said they had conducted the case well.
“You are doing good work, Larry,” said the city editor. “Keep it up!”
Whereat Larry blushed like a girl, though he felt ashamed of it. However, he need not have been, for not a reporter on the paper, from the oldest down, but who would have liked to have had such a beat to his credit.