“Sure,” he said in the established vernacular of the West.
“What is your name, little boy?” I inquired, with the sternest brand of condescension I could command.
The young monkey drew himself up at that and 350 flushed angrily. “Oh, I don’t know as I’m so little,” he observed, regarding me with a narrowing eye as I stepped unbidden beyond the sacred portals.
“Where will I find Mr. McKail’s secretary?” I asked, noticing the door in the stained-wood partition with “Private” on its frosted glass. The youth nodded his head toward the door in question and crossed to a desk where he proceeded languidly to affix postage-stamps to a small pile of envelopes.
I hesitated for a moment, as though there was something epochal in the air, as though I was making a step which might mean a great deal to me. And then I stepped over to the door and opened it.
I saw a young woman seated at a flat-topped desk, with a gold-banded fountain-pen in her fingers, checking over a column of figures. She checked carefully on to the end of her column, and then she raised her head and looked at me.
Her face stood out with singular distinctness, in the strong side-light from the office-window. And the woman seated at the flat-topped desk was Alsina Teeswater.
I don’t know how long I stood there without speaking. But I could see the color slowly mount and recede on Alsina Teeswater’s face. She put down 351 her fountain-pen, with much deliberation, and sat upright in her chair, with her barricaded eyes every moment of the time on my face.
“So this has started again?” I finally said, in little more than a whisper.
I could see the girl’s lips harden. I could see her fortifying herself behind an entrenchment of quietly marshaled belligerency.