He remembered the incident clearly. Jensen, the slot man, had picked it up and read it through. Then he had laughed and put it on the spike.
One of the others asked: "What was funny, Jens?"
So Jensen took the story off the spike and threw it over to him. It had gone the rounds of the desk, with each man reading it, and finally it had got back on the spike again.
And that had been the last of it. For the story was too wacky for any newsman to give a second glance. It had all the earmarks of the phony.
Charley didn't find what he was looking for the first day, although he worked well into the evening—so he went back the next afternoon, and found it.
It was out of a little resort town up in Wisconsin, and it told about an invalid named Cooper Jackson who had been bedridden since he was two or three years old. The story said that Cooper's old man claimed that Cooper could foresee things, that he would think of something or imagine something during the evening and the next day it would happen. Things like Linc Abrams' driving his car into the culvert at Trout Run and coming out all right himself, but with the car all smashed to Hinders, and like the Reverend Amos Tucker's getting a letter from a brother he hadn't heard from in more than twenty years.
The next day Charley spoke to Jensen.
"I got a few days coming," he said, "from that time I worked six-day weeks last fall, and I still got a week of last year's vacation you couldn't find the room for . . ."
"Sure, Charley," Jensen said. "We're in good shape right now."
TWO days later Charley stepped off the milk-run train in the little resort town in Wisconsin. He went to one of the several cabin camps down on the lake that fronted the town and got himself a small, miserable cabin for which he paid an exorbitant price. And it wasn't until then that he dared let himself think— really think—of the reason he had come there.