“How you can stick your nose at the grindstone is a source of wonder to me,” he said. “I couldn’t—”
“Shut up!” snapped Tab, and the desirable silence was his. He finished the last page at eleven, sent off his copy by a punctual messenger, then filling his pipe, stretched himself luxuriously in his mission chair.
“Now I’m a free man until Monday afternoon—”
The hall telephone signalled at that moment and he got up with a groan.
“Boast not!” he growled. “That is the office or I’m a saint!”
It was the office, as he had so intelligently foreseen. He snapped a few words at the transmitter and came back to the room. And Tab was very voluble.
A Polish gentleman concerned in certain frauds on insurance companies had been arrested, escaped again, and having barricaded himself in his house, was keeping the police at bay with the aid of boiling water and a large axe.
“Jacko is enthusiastic about it,” said the savage Tab, speaking thus disrespectfully of his city editor, “says it is real drama—I told him to send the dramatic critic. Gosh—I did his job the other night.”
“Going out?” asked Rex with mild interest.
“Of course I’m going out, you thick-headed jibberer!” said the other unkindly as he struggled into the collar he had discarded.