Few knew Mr. Manfred’s butler, a dark-browed foreigner, rather stout and somewhat saturnine. He was a man who talked very little even to the cook and the two housemaids who came every morning at eight and left the house punctually at six, for Mr. Manfred dined out most nights.
He advertised only in the more exclusive newspapers, and not in his own name; no interviews were granted except by appointment, so that the arrival of Mr. Sam Barberton was in every sense an irregularity.
He knocked at the door just as the maids were leaving, and since they knew little about Manfred and his ways except that he liked poached eggs and spinach for breakfast, the stranger was allowed to drift into the hall, and here the taciturn butler, hastily summoned from his room, found him.
The visitor was a stubby, thick-set man with a brick-red face and a head that was both grey and bald. His dress and his speech were equally rough. The butler saw that he was no ordinary artisan because his boots were of a kind known as veldtschoons. They were of undressed leather, patchily bleached by the sun.
“I want to see the boss of this Triangle,” he said in a loud voice, and, diving into his waistcoat pocket, brought out a soiled newspaper cutting.
The butler took it from him without a word. It was the Cape Times—he would have known by the type and the spacing even if on the back there had not been printed the bisected notice of a church bazaar at Wynberg. The butler studied such things.
“I am afraid that you cannot see Mr. Manfred without an appointment,” he said. His voice and manner were most unexpectedly gentle in such a forbidding man.
“I’ve got to see him, if I sit here all night,” said the man stubbornly, and symbolized his immovability by squatting down in the hall chair.
Not a muscle of the servant’s face moved. It was impossible to tell whether he was angry or amused.
“I got this cutting out of a paper I found on the Benguella—she docked at Tilbury this afternoon—and I came straight here. I should never have dreamt of coming at all, only I want fair play for all concerned. That Portuguese feller with a name like a cigar—Villa, that’s it!—he said, ‘What’s the good of going to London when we can settle everything on board ship?’ But half-breed Portuguese! My God, I’d rather deal with bushmen! Bushmen are civilized—look here.”