“Why, yes,” Penny acknowledged. “Is anything wrong with it?”
“Only that you’ve buried the wrong man,” DeWitt said sarcastically. “Where did you get that name?”
Penny felt actually sick, and her skin prickled with heat. She stared at the story in print. It said that John Gorman had died that morning in Mercy Hospital.
“The man who died was John Borman,” DeWitt said grimly. “It happens that John Gorman is one of the city’s most prominent industrialists. We’ve made the correction, but it was too late to catch two-thirds of the papers.”
Penny stared again at the name, her mind working slowly.
“But Mr. DeWitt,” she protested. “I don’t think I wrote it that way. I knew the correct name was Borman. I’m sure that was how I turned it in.”
“Maybe you hit a wrong letter on the typewriter,” the editor said less severely. “That’s why one always should read over a story after it’s written.”
“But I did that too,” Penny said, and then bit her lip, because she realized she was arguing about the matter.
“We’ll look at the carbons,” decided Mr. DeWitt.
They had been taken from the spindles by copy boys, but the editor ordered the entire day’s work returned to his desk. Pawing through the sheets, he came to the one Penny had written. Swiftly he compared it with the original copy.