"How do you know it's vacant? Are you a friend of his?"
"Hardly that. The information just drifted my way."
"You handed me that stuff at the Outlaws' Ball. Who the devil are you, anyway?"
Whenever Burley spoke vehemently, he shoveled the words from the left side of his mouth, a process that contorted his face into the exact likeness of a cartoon by Briggs.
"You might be a spy," he added, putting a cigar in his mouth and scowling horribly at his visitor.
The latter replied in a quiet and dignified but judiciously injured tone.
"Mr. Burley, you have my card. Go into my personal history all you like. But first, let me refer to the service I did you at the ball. It was a small matter—"
"Don't get puffed up about it then," growled Burley, with much less hostility, however.
"No fear," continued Mark Pryor, as terse as his host and much more urbane. "I mention it only because an ounce of action is worth a ton of talk. Or a cartload of stuffy introductions. The point is this. Having learned that you had discharged Mr. Lloyd—"
"Who says I discharged him?" Burley noisily cut in. "He discharged himself."