The property man proved equal to the occasion, after explanations had been made. He brought out a substantial wooden box and began to fill the bottom of it with crumpled newspapers. Jimmy stopped him.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Never give ’em a chance to have anything on you is always my motto. These are Cleveland papers and this box is supposed to come from Chicago. Maybe someone would notice that. Put your coat on and dust around to that out-of-town newspaper stand over on Superior Avenue and buy a bunch of yesterday’s Chicago papers.”
When the property man came back a few minutes later and began to crumple up the newspapers he brought with him, Jimmy turned to his friend again.
“Not a bad little touch, eh, Tom?” he remarked.
“Immense,” agreed the other sincerely. “I’ve got to hand it to you. You certainly overlook no bets.”
The pasteboard box containing the pie was carefully placed on top of the bed of newspapers and other papers were packed in tightly around and above it. The lid was nailed solidly on and Jimmy affixed an express label addressed to himself. When the box had been carefully loaded on a push wagon in charge of a small colored boy and was on its way down Euclid Avenue toward the Star office, personally chaperoned by the two press agents, the conspiracy was completed.
Chapter Twenty
E. Cartwright Jenkins, dramatic editor of the Star, was distinctly displeased with life as a whole and with humanity in general that morning. His professional dignity had been subjected to a series of frontal and flank attacks of great violence for nearly twenty-four hours and the final insult had been handed out by the managing editor who had just left the little cubby hole designated by a painted sign as the “dramatic department.”
E. Cartwright had read Jimmy’s oleaginous epistle three times at the breakfast table the morning before and had left his home in a fine glow of self-approval. In fancy he walked upon the misty mountain tops of high achievement until he reached the Star office and then he found himself hurled suddenly into the well known slough of despond. Billy Parsons, the advertising manager, who met him in the elevator, started it.