or the little boy who had the operation; those weren’t things you could write about with your tongue in cheek, and that’s the way I wrote it.
But I did write about the little two and three paragraph items I had found tucked away in the issues I had gone through—the good luck stories; the little happy stories of no consequence, except for the ones they had happened to—about people finding things they’d lost months or years ago, about stray dogs coming home, and kids winning essay contests, and neighbor helping neighbor. All the kindly little news stories that we’d thrown in just to fill up awkward holes.
There were a lot of them—a lot more, it seemed to me, than you could normally expect to find. All these things happened in our town in the last three weeks, I wrote at the end of it.
And I added one last line: Have you put out that bowl of milk?
After it was finished, I sat there for a while, debating whether I should hand it in. And thinking it over, I decided that the Barnacle had it coming to him, after the way he’d shot off his mouth.
So I threw it into the basket on the city desk and went back to write the community chest story.
The Barnacle never said a thing to me and I didn’t say a thing to him; you could have knocked my eyes off with a stick when the kid brought the papers up from the pressroom, and there was my brownie story spread across the top of page one in an eight-column feature strip.
No one mentioned it to me except Jo Ann, who came along and patted me on the head and said she was proud of me—although Cod knows why she should have been.
Then the Barnacle sent me out on another one of his wild-goose chases concerning someone who was supposed to be building a home-made atomic pile in his back yard. It turned out that this fellow is an old geezer who, at one time, had built a perpetual motion machine that didn’t work. Once I found that out, I was so disgusted that I didn’t even go back to the office, but went straight home instead.
* * * *
I rigged up a block and tackle, had some trouble what with no one to help me, but I finally got the boat up on the blocks. Then I drove to a little village at the end of the lake and bought paint for not only the boat, but the cottage as well. I felt pretty good about making such a fine start on all the work I should do that fall.
The next morning when I got to the office, I found the place in an uproar. The switchboard had been clogged all night and it still looked like a Christmas tree. One of the operators had passed out, and they were trying to bring her to.
The Barnacle had a wild gleam in his eye, and his necktie was all askew. When he saw me, he took me firmly by the arm and led me to my desk and sat me down. “Now, damn you, get to work!” he yelled and he dumped a bale of notes down in front of me.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“It’s that brownie deal of yours,” he yelled. “Thousands of people are calling in. All of them have brownies; they’ve been helped by brownies; some of them have even seen brownies.”
“What about the milk?” I asked.
“Milk? What milk?”
“Why, the milk they should set out for them.”
“How do I know,” he said. “Why don’t you call up some of the milk companies and find out.”
* * * *
That is just what I did—and, so help me Hannah, the milk companies were slowly going crazy. Every driver had come racing back to get extra milk, because the most of their customers were ordering an extra quart or so. They were lined up for blocks outside the stations waiting for new loads and the milk supply was running low.
There weren’t any of us in the newsroom that morning who did anything but write brownie copy. We filled the paper with it—all sorts of stories about how the brownies had been helping people. Except, of course, they hadn’t known it was brownies helping them until they read my story. They’d just thought that it was good luck.
When the first edition was in, we sat back and sort of caught our breath—although the calls still were coming in—and I swear my typewriter still was hot from the copy I’d turned out.
The papers came up, and each of us took our copy and started to go through it, when we heard a roar from J. H.’s office. A second later, J. H. came out himself, waving a paper in his fist, his face three shades redder than a brand-new fire truck.
He practically galloped to the city desk and he flung the paper down in front of the Barnacle and hit it with his fist. “What do you mean?” he shouted. “Explain yourself. Making us ridiculous!”
“But, J. H. I thought it was a good gag and…”
“Brownies!” J. H. snorted.
“We got all those calls,” said Barnacle Bill. “They still are coming in. And…”
“That’s enough,” J. H. thundered. “You’re fired!”
He swung around from the city desk and looked straight at me. “You’re the one who started it,” he said. “You’re fired, too.”
I got up from my chair and moved over to the city desk. “We’ll be back a little later,” I told J. H., “to collect Our severance pay.”
He flinched a little at that, but he didn’t back up any.
The Barnacle picked up an ash tray off his desk and let it fall. It hit the floor and broke. He dusted off his hands. “Come on, Mark,” he said “I’ll buy you a drink.”
IV
We went over to the corner. Joe brought us a bottle and a couple of glasses, and we settled down to business.
Pretty soon some of the other boys started dropping in. They’d have a drink or two with us and then go back to work. It was their way of showing us they were sorry the way things had turned out. They didn’t say anything, but they kept dropping in. There never was a time during the entire afternoon when there wasn’t some one drinking with us. The Barnacle and I took on quite a load.
We talked over this brownie business, and at first we were a little skeptical about it, laying the situation more or less to public gullibility. But the more we thought about it, and the more we drank, the more we began to believe, there might really be brownies. For one thing, good luck just doesn’t come in hunks the way it appeared to have come to this town of ours in the last few weeks. Good luck is apt to scatter itself around a bit—and while it may run in streaks, it’s usually pretty thin. But here it seemed that hundreds—if not thousands—of persons had been visited by good luck.
* * * *
By the middle of the afternoon, we were fairly well agreed there might be something to this brownie business. Then of course, we tried to figure out who the brownies were, and why they were helping people.
“You know what I think,” said the Barnacle. “I think they’re aliens. People from the stars. Maybe they’re the ones who have been flying all these saucers.”
“But why would aliens want to help us?” I objected. “Sure, they’d want to watch us and find out all they could; and after a while,
