Purdick shoved his books aside.
“There’s no time like the present, Maxie. If we’re going to try to straighten this mess up for Larry, let’s go to it.”
“I’m with you,” said Dick, getting upon his feet quickly. “Only I haven’t any more idea than the man in the moon where to begin.”
“Perhaps I can help out a little on that end of it,” said Purdick, with a sort of crooked smile, adding: “I’m about ten years older than you are, Maxie, in some things.” And then he got his coat and cap and they went out together.
Most naturally, when they were in the street, Dick thought Purdick would head for one of the houses across the campus where the various members of the faculty lived. The only possible thing to do, as he saw it, was to get some one of the professors interested and so start a faculty investigation. But Purdick seemed to have a plan of his own, for when they reached the cross-street corner, he turned short and led the way toward the bridge and the town.
There was no pause made until they reached “Pat’s Place,” and none there, save that Purdick glanced up at the windows in the second story as if to see whether they were lighted or dark. Following the upward glance, Dick saw that there was a light in an upper room, and the next thing he knew he was climbing a narrow stair at Purdick’s heels. At a door near the stair-head, Purdick rapped, and a mumbling voice said thickly: “Come in, then!”
What Dick saw when the door opened under Purdick’s hand was a rather gaudily furnished room with a thick-piled carpet on the floor which looked as if it were rarely swept. There was a desk in the middle of the room, and in the pivot-chair belonging to it sat a man with a round, fat face, little pig-like black eyes, black mustaches curled at the ends, and shiny black hair plastered in a barber’s curl on his forehead. To keep up the color scheme the man had a black cigar clamped between his teeth, and on his feet, which were cocked up on the desk, were shoes which looked as if they had just escaped from the polishing attack of a bootblack.
Dick didn’t know the man from Adam, but he read the papers often enough to be able to guess at once that the upper room was the private—and unofficial—office of the most notorious of the little city’s board of aldermen, Mr. Patrick Clanahan.
“Little college lads, eh?” grunted the man in the chair, as they filed in and stood before him. “What’d ye be wantin’ o’ me at this time o’ night?”
Dick couldn’t have told to save his life, but little Purdick seemed to labor under no handicap whatever.