“Yes; but that was before it all came out in the newspapers,” Jarvis cut in glibly. “He doesn’t mind your talking about it now; in fact, he told me to ask you.”
For something better than a week the reporter had been assiduously cultivating Mrs. Seeley’s housemaid, and one of the results of the intimacy was a second visit to Brant’s room, made in the landlady’s absence and connived at and arranged by Mary McCarthy. Jarvis hoped little from a second inspection of the room, and not much from anything the housemaid could tell. Yet he lied brazenly to make her talk, and the lie accomplished that whereunto it was sent.
“Ah, then, did he tell you that, poor man?” said the unsuspecting Mary.
“He did, for a fact; couldn’t come himself, you know, poor fellow!” rejoined the reporter, clinching the falsehood promptly. “Now show me just what you did and tell me what you saw.”
Thus absolved and adjured, Mary McCarthy went circumstantially over the account of her discovery of the burglar, Jarvis absorbing the story as it was told, and leaving the journalistic compartment of his brain to sift the salient facts from the mass of embellishment and exaggeration.
“Black clothes, you say?” he interrupted, when the housemaid came to the describing of the intruder.
“Black as Father Callahan’s cassock.”
“Then he didn’t look like a tramp or a tough?”
“On’y for the oogly face av him I might have mistook him for Misther Brant himself.”
Jarvis strolled to the window and stood with his hands deep in his pockets, looking out upon the tin roof of the porch.