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“You know, Jane’s right,” Benjamin said. “There’s work to be done.”

“Are you saying you’re in for the next phase, too?”

Benjamin handed me back my chalk and marker. “I haven’t bought a ticket back yet. I should wait a week to head back south. We could kick things off right now. What do you say?”

In a gift store, we came to my final typo find and correction. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it manifested as an its/it’s confusion. The typo hid in a legend accompanying a little packaged plastic gnome: THIS MYTHICAL CREATURE IS SAID TO BRING LUCK TO IT’S OWNER! The mythical creature in question would bring only grammatical confusion to its owner if I didn’t step in, so I markered out the apostrophe. Jane watched me as she played with some toys nearby.

“What a tiny apostrophe that was,” she said. “The gnome itself looked like a giant next to it.”

Such a tiny thing, but such a big difference it had made. The episode seemed a fitting end to our quest. Though I might have made a mistake in not buying the little garden dweller, as I could have used the luck.

When we got back to the apartment, Benjamin hauled his bags into the living room and commandeered the couch. After blogging our finds, I concluded that last post suggesting that everyone should “stay tuned” for more to come, and over the next few days I kicked off a typo-hunting contest (offering a free TEAL shirt as a prize) and wrote posts about typos and the practice of their elimination, leading up to some bigger discussions … that circumstances would soon prevent from flowering. Benjamin and I began to put together big plans for the future of the League.

A couple days before Benjamin left, a visitor arrived at my apartment. Jane and I were out at the time, so my roommate answered the door on that fateful Thursday morning. Benjamin sat in the living room reading Arthur C. Clarke, and overheard the interloper ask for either Jeff Deck or Benjamin Herson. Benjamin popped up and introduced himself to a tall, muscular fellow squeezed into a tan uniform that reminded him of his Boy Scout days. “Is Jeff Deck here as well?”

“Not at the present time, but this is his place,” Benjamin answered. “I’m the one just visiting. What’s … this about?”

The uniformed man handed over some photocopied documents, and his card. “This is about a sign you vandalized at the Grand Canyon.”

Appalled by the man’s characterization of the act, Benjamin replied, “We corrected it.”

“It was a hundred years old,” the ranger said.

“Oh.” Benjamin signed that he’d officially received the documents, for both of us.

The National Park Service was not grateful for the correction that we’d made to the sign in the South Rim watchtower at the Grand Canyon. Their response was, in fact, the opposite of gratitude. The pages, which were hasty copies of the first couple of pages of some longer, absent document, described how we had first conspired to vandalize and then vandalized a precious national historic treasure. The federal government very much desired that we travel back to Arizona in the near future for a chat with a man in a long robe. Benjamin and I had both been summoned to court, unwilling participants in a case called United States of America v. Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson. Now there was a phrase to make you soil your breeches. If the title of the case wasn’t enough to communicate the gravity of our plight, the consequences of an unfavorable verdict certainly were. Six months of federal imprisonment was one possible outcome.

Suddenly the saga of the Typo Eradication Advancement League had taken a bleak twist. We frantically tried to figure out what to do next. Our first conclusion was that when faced with court summons, one ought to seek out some sort of representation. This went double when the plaintiff was a disgruntled federal agency. Jane promised to follow up on some meager legal connections for us. Meanwhile, I stripped the Grand Canyon entry out of the archives. Not long after that, after speaking with a couple different attorneys, I realized