Page:Elizabeth Jordan--Tales of the city room.djvu/61

 The words died on his lips. Coming through the door, with his most débonnaire air, was the luckless Davidson—here apparently to hopelessly tangle up again what had been so adroitly straightened out for him.

"Was my stuff all right, old man?" he asked Kelly, cheerily.

Kelly looked up with an apolegetic smile.

"Yes, it was," he said, "and we owe you an apology, Davidson. We found a nasty little joke about 'The Searchlight' on my desk and thought you had written it and all that 'Funmaker' stuff. Marbury was hot about it, and there was a heap of trouble ahead of you, when this little rat [indicating Chesterfield] comes and owns up to it because he heard us talking about it as yours. He slipped it into the stuff on my desk." He turned to the boy with sudden suspicion. "How did you get it typewritten?" he asked.

"Miss Smith lets me practise on her typewriter when she's out to lunch," said the boy, telling the truth promptly, "'cos I want to learn."

This Kelly knew to be true, for he had seen the boy manipulating the keys. It