He saw that she was determined, so he did not protest further, but his reluctant gaze followed her as she disappeared up the narrow dirty stairway.
The mayor attended to the official business of Prouty at a flat-top desk in a large front room where he also wrote an occasional life insurance policy. As the insurance business was a rise from a disreputable saloon and gambling joint, so the saloon and gambling joint had been a step upward from his former means of livelihood as a dance-hall tout in a neighboring state.
With his election to an office which nobody else wanted, an incipient ambition began to stir. Already his mind was busy with plans for advancement, and each move that he made was with an eye to the future. But one thing was certain, and it was that wherever his Star of Destiny led him he would remain, underneath any veneer of polish which experience might give him, the barroom bully, the mental and moral tinhorn that Nature had made him.
Enveloped in a cloud of the malodorous smoke of a cheap cigar and tilted on the hind legs of his chair with his heels hooked in the rungs, he was resting his head against the wall where a row of smudges from his oily black hair bore evidence to the fact that it was a favorite position.
Hearing a woman’s light step and catching a glimpse of a woman’s skirt as Kate came down the corridor, he removed his cigar and unhooked his heels preparatory to rising.
She was in the doorway before he recognized her; where she paused during a moment’s look of mutual inquiry. Then, with all the deliberation of an intentional insult he retilted his chair, returned his heels to the rungs and replaced his cigar while he surveyed her with a quite indescribable insolence.
“Tinhorn” had no special reason for the act and it served no purpose; it was merely the instinctive act of the bully who strikes in wanton cruelty at something or somebody he knows cannot retaliate. His Honor found a satisfaction now in watching the blood rise flaming to the roots of Kate’s hair and it gave him a feeling of power knowing that she must accept the humiliation or leave with her errand unstated, though he guessed the nature of her visit.
It pleased him, however, to feign ignorance when, gripping the frame of the doorway, she said in a voice that trembled noticeably in spite of her obvious effort to steady it:
“I came to ask you if it’s true—that you mean to stop work—on the—case?”
He rolled the chewed end of his cigar between his yellow snags of teeth and asked insolently: