“NO MORE MISTAKES”
Joan, with pounding heart, lifted her eyes and looked at Mr. Albert
Johnson. He was a man of about fifty and was seated in the chair at
Tim’s desk. His hair was thin and his face was round. He was holding his
gray felt hat and his yellow gloves in his hands resting upon a yellow
cane between his knees. He was tapping the cane on the floor—not with
impatience, Joan realized, but it was that cross kind of a tapping noise
that a person makes when he is very angry and is trying to control
himself. Mr. Johnson’s face told her the same thing. It was red, now,
and his mouth was set like a bulldog’s. His eyes glared at her. Tim was
standing there, too, silent. The rest of the office staff was watching
the scene, and pretending not to.
“And are you the young woman who typed this—this—” Mr. Albert Johnson
lifted up his hat and his hand shook as he held a folded newspaper
toward her, “this ridiculous story about me?”
“Yes,” was Joan’s faint answer. “But—”
“Why,” the man seemed to be seeing her now for the first time, “why,
you’re nothing but a child. Are you really able to run a typewriter?”
“Yes,” she said again. She hated to be called a child.
“Very, very peculiar.” Mr. Johnson tapped his yellow cane harder than
ever.
Joan could bear it no longer. “But I’m just positive I wrote that name
Albert Jackson,” she burst out.
The bulldog man eyed her. “Can you prove it?”
“No, the copy was different. It was changed.” She was full of the
mystery, having just come from the discussion over it with Chub and Amy.
“We’re working on it—the mystery—now, and maybe we’ll have it cleared
up. We have a suspect already.”
The man still glared at her. “Young woman, do you know that I’m part
owner of this paper with your Uncle John—the general manager is your
uncle, isn’t he?—and that I’m a lifelong friend and chief backer of the
_Journal’s_ candidate for the coming election?”
“Oh, dear!” Joan almost sobbed. “I knew you lived out on North Market
Street, so I imagined you must be somebody, but I never dreamed you were
all that!”
The bulldog man’s eyes actually twinkled and the yellow cane was still.
“Well, I am,” he snapped, “all that. Of course, you’re too young to
understand about politics, but if you’re big enough to help around a
newspaper office, you must know how disastrous it is to have a mistake
like this come out in the paper.” He waggled the newspaper again.
“Oh, I do!” breathed Joan, fervently.
“It’s going to cost this young man his job, I’m afraid.” Mr. Johnson
turned his head slightly toward Tim. Her brother’s face was white.
“Oh, no, please!” beseeched the girl. “It wasn’t his fault, at all. I
did it, so why should he lose his job? He needs the money so badly for
college this fall.” Why, it’d be terrible to have Tim lose his job.
Tim gave her a look that said, “You didn’t need to say _that_.”
“But your brother admits he read the copy over, after you’d typed it.”
Mr. Johnson leaned over his cane. “First off, I suspected something
crooked, but when I found out just a kid had made the mistake.... Your
brother did read it over, didn’t he?”
Joan nodded dumbly. Then her mind, in its wretchedness, went back to the
mystery. “But, Mr. Johnson,” she began, unmindful of Tim’s watchful
eyes, “don’t you think that when we both read the story over, it’s
mighty queer that it had a mistake like that in it, and neither of us
saw it?”
“But you probably did it unconsciously. You’re young. The boy’s new at
the job and was in a hurry. He let it slip,” answered the man. “You see,
I know a lot about newspaper work.”
“Do you know anything about mysteries?” Joan couldn’t help but ask.
Somehow this fierce little man was not so fierce as he seemed. He had
had a perfect right to be angry. Indeed, there was something really
rather likable about him.
A smile played about his bulldog features. “Well,” he drawled. “I ought
to. I have indigestion bad, lots of times, and then I can’t get to
sleep, so I keep a good detective story right by my bed, all the time. I
guess I read about one a week.”
“And don’t you think we have a mystery here?” Joan dropped her voice.
In answer, Mr. Johnson motioned Tim to leave. “I’ll talk with this young
woman alone,” he said, and shoved a chair toward her. “Now, let’s get
this straight. To begin with, before we go on to your little mystery,
let me ask you, do you realize how serious a mistake like that is?”
“It’s libel,” said Joan, sadly. “I’ve lived next to the _Journal_”—she
pointed through the smudgy window to her red brick home—“all my life,
and I do know how terrible mistakes are. Daddy was city editor, and I
know how particular he was about it.”
“Well, then what about me?” asked Mr. Johnson.
“Oh, I’m sure the _Journal_ will make it right some way—write a
contradictory story and explain that the Albert Johnson who lived on
North Market Street is not the Albert Jackson who deserted his two
children. Tim’ll write you something nice, I know. And the publicity may
even help you.” She smiled encouragingly. Oh, if she could only get Tim
out of this mess!
[Illustration: “I’ll talk with this young woman all alone,” he said.]
“Well, all right, I’ll risk that.” The man cleared his throat. “And now
to business. Who’s the suspect?”
Joan slid her chair up until her red plaid skirt touched the
gray-trousered knees of Mr. Albert Johnson. His cane was leaning back
against his arm now. She told him all about the Dummy—how the copy must
have been changed, and Dummy had insisted that it had been handed to him
like that, when she knew she hadn’t written it wrong.
Then she went on and told him how she and Chub and Amy had jumped to the
conclusion that Dummy was a spy. “Every crime has a motive, you know,”
she assured him earnestly. “And so we thought it all out. Of course,
we’ll have to have more evidence than just that before we can accuse
him.”
“Of course,” nodded Albert Johnson. “Now, listen here. I’m part owner
here and I’ll fix it for your brother to stay on here, and for you to
stick around this office as much as you like, on one condition.”
“Yes, indeed.” Joan felt she would promise anything to save Tim.
“I want you to promise me to watch out for ‘developments’ as you call
them, and come to me the next time anything suspicious happens. I don’t
mind admitting things look queer. And don’t you accuse any one until you
come to me. Remember?”
That would be easy! They were going to watch for developments, anyway.
And Tim’s job would be safe.
Mr. Johnson got Tim back to the desk, and shook his hand, before he went
into Uncle John’s little office with the frosted glass door and the
“John W. Martin” on it. Joan watched his bulldog profile shadowed there
until Mother telephoned to Tim to “send Joan home to help with dinner.”
Amy had left long ago.
Nothing very exciting happened anyway, Joan learned later. Uncle John
had been on the verge of firing Tim, but after his talk with Mr.
Johnson, he said Tim could remain on probation, providing no more
mistakes happened. That evening, Tim spent hours wording an apology
concerning Mr. Johnson for the paper, and Joan insisted that he tell the
public what a nice man Mr. Johnson was.
Tim told her that Mr. Johnson was a wealthy man who dabbled in politics
as a pastime, so she understood how he had time to bother with
mysteries. The _Journal_ staff would be interested in it, but they were
all too busy to do much more than wonder. She did not tell any one that
she had enlisted Mr. Johnson’s services in the detective work.
Tim’s write-up of Mr. Johnson must have met with his approval, because
he telephoned Joan about twenty minutes after the paper was out, that he
was about ready to forgive the entire affair. He asked Joan whether she
were watching out for the mystery.
She was. Now that she had gained permission from Uncle John and the
editor, through Mr. Johnson, to “stick around” the office, she fairly
camped there every waking moment. Of course, Miss Betty and Tim took
advantage of having such a willing young worker around. Miss Betty let
her copy the news from the suburban towns, which usually came in in
longhand. Joan loved it and worked painstakingly. Tim grumbled at times,
Mack teased, Cookie joked, and even the editor got used to seeing her
around.
“Newspaper work is hard,” Cookie would tell her when she would make a
little face about being sent on so many errands for Tim. “Make up your
mind to get used to hard work and nothing else. You work as hard as you
can on one story; then it’s printed and over with and you start on
something else. Always some new excitement on a newspaper.”
Joan understood that, for look how soon every one had forgotten the
episode of the mysterious mistake about the Albert Johnson story—or
appeared to. But she and Chub had not. The office boy had a new solution
to offer every day.
“The life of a newspaper is just ten minutes,” Cookie told her another
time.
Ten minutes. She glanced around at the staff all working feverishly to
get out the paper. And the actual interest in the paper lasted only
about ten minutes. That was true, she guessed. Still, all the _Journal_
family seemed to enjoy their jobs.
After a week, Joan suddenly realized that she had joined the staff just
in time for the annual outing. June nineteenth was just June nineteenth
to a lot of people in Plainfield, but to the members of the _Journal_
family, it was the big day of the year—the one day when they dropped
their labors of supplying the town with news and took an afternoon and
evening off. The _Journal_ members were jolly for the most part while
they worked. But when they took time off to play they were a perfect
circus. Joan looked forward to the picnic.
A neat “box,” that is, a little outlined notice, appeared on the front
page of the paper at the beginning of the week, announcing that the
_Journal_ would come out early on Friday in order that the staff and all
employees could attend the annual picnic. Of course, it would be an
unusually slim paper that day, but the subscribers did not mind one day
in the year. Always by one o’clock on June nineteenth the paper was out
on the street and the staff ready to pile into the two big busses
chartered for the occasion.
Now Joan could go along. She and Tim had both gone when Daddy was
editor, but that was long ago. All the employees took their families,
and Joan would go. Mother, too, perhaps. But no, Mrs. Martin declined
the invitation immediately.
“Bounce around in those uncomfortable, crowded busses for an hour, get
eaten alive by mosquitoes and things, and come home as tired as though
I’d done two weeks’ washing? No, thank you. I’ll take the day off, too,
but I’ll run out and see sister Effie. She’s thinking about having her
appendix taken out, and wants my advice.”
The big event at the picnic was the baseball game, and this year the
_Journal_ team was scheduled to play the _Star_. The _Journal_ team this
year was excellent—Mack, Mr. Nixon, Lefty the photographer, Burke the
bookkeeper, Cookie, the two advertising men, and one of the pressmen.
Chub and Bossy always sat on the bench—that is, they were substitutes
and hardly hoped for an opportunity to play. Would Tim get to play, Joan
wondered. The first day he had come to work, Chub grabbed him. “You’ll
try out for the team, won’t you? I bet you’re a peacherino pitcher.”
Joan could easily see that Chub thought Tim mighty near perfection.
Well, she thought so, too, most of the time, herself. He had been a star
in the game at high school, but the men on the _Journal_ team were all
older than he was.
The owners of the _Journal_ were proud of the prowess of the _Journal_
team and their interest in baseball. The owners had this year ordered
baseball suits for the team, and the _Journal_ nine had challenged the
_Star_ team to a game to be played at the annual outing.
The suits arrived one day during Tim’s first week on the paper and that
afternoon no one worked. Fortunately, Bossy did not come in with the
boxes until the paper was out. Bossy’s eyes were just visible over the
big flat suit boxes. Instantly, every member of the staff forgot that
the paper must come out to-morrow just as to-day. They’d all work
overtime to-morrow and get it out in record time, but now they had to
look at the suits.
They were striped gray flannel with “Journal” written across the front
in flaming red letters.
Bossy’s brown eyes were almost popping out of his face. He had always
played substitute, but he was a bit puzzled now. Was he to have one of
the suits?
“Here’s my fat one,” Cookie held up a shirt by the sleeves across his
plump front. He was a dandy catcher but a bit slow on bases.
“This skinny one must be yours, Mack!” The editor tossed him a gray
bundle. “Just look through these, Bossy. There was one ordered for you.”
Bossy’s eyes blinked behind their glasses. “Deed and I will, sah.”
Then the red socks were distributed. “Double up your fist and if it goes
around that, it’ll fit.” Miss Betty did the measuring.
Chub was squeezing into his suit, putting it on over his everyday
clothes, and soon the others followed his example. Cookie looked like a
young boy in his. They all paraded up and down, until Miss Betty rushed
to her typewriter and began pounding out a poem to celebrate the
occasion. She called it, “The Wearing of the Gray.” They all clapped
when she read it aloud. She tried to coax Mr. Nixon to promise to print
it.
“Luckily for me,” said the editor, “the _Journal’s_ policy is never to
print poetry.”
Whereupon Miss Betty made up a jingling tune to go with the words, and
taught it to every one to use as a cheer.
“Let’s have a bit of practice.” The editor was in rare good humor, for
they usually practiced in the late afternoons. “But, since I seem to
recall a certain mishap, I suggest we step outside for our practice.”
He meant the time that they had had a few “passes” right there in the
big editorial room, one day when work was slack, and Chub had missed a
ball. The glass in the ticker, which reeled out yellow lengths of news
bulletins, had been broken since that day.
They went through the windows to the grassy place by Joan’s home. Em
scurried out of the way at the first ball.
Joan sat on her own side steps and looked on. How handsome Tim was, in
that gray uniform and cap! Chub sat beside her, both of them engrossed
in watching the men making catches and putting out imaginary opponents.
“We _have_ to beat the _Star_,” she vowed.
Suddenly, Mr. Nixon, who was captain by courtesy, called Tim. “Lefty
here and I have been watching you play, Tim. You’re fast and sure. I
believe I’ll put you in as shortstop.”
Tim grinned. Every one seemed delighted. Miss Betty was loud in her
exclamation. Only Mack was silent. He appeared peeved. Why should he
care whether Tim was on the team or not?
“No clews to the mystery,” Chub said glumly. “I’ve been watching for
developments every minute. Maybe we’ll get some at the picnic.”
“Maybe.” Joan hoped so, because she did want to solve the mystery and
make it up to Tim for having got him into such a mess with the Albert
Johnson story.