“From all I hear, it would be easier to tell what you’re not to do. Everyone of them has got a scheme for unloading something on you. First you’re to do a lot of Dent’s work, like the proofs and Agricultural and Religious; then Murtagh wants to put State News on you, and Tyler tells me you’ve got to do the weekly as soon as you get your hand in, and Art, Music and the Drama is a thing that must go up stairs, now that the baseball season has begun, for I can’t attend to it. But if they play it too low down on you, just you make a stout kick to Workman about it.”
While Seth pondered this outlook and advice, they reached the Chronicle office, and presently, by a succession of dark and devious stair-ways, he found himself in an ancient cockloft, curiously cut up by low partitions into compartments like horse-stalls, each with a window at the end, and was introduced as “the new man” to Mr. Anthony Tyler, otherwise Tony.
This gentleman bore no outward signs of the excess of spirituous liquor to which Tom had alluded, and was very cordial and pleasant. He was extremely dark in hair, beard and eyes, seemed to be not more than thirty, and sat at a table piled high with books, clippings and the like, and surrounded by great heaps of papers. Tom glanced over two or three of these latter, and then went off humming a tune lightly and calling out to Seth in imitation of a popular air, as he rattled down stairs “I’ll meet you when the form goes down.”
Among other polite questions Tyler asked Seth where he was stopping.
“Nowhere permanently. I must find some place. I stopped last night with Mr. Votts.”
“With whom?”
“With Mr. Votts, the gentleman who just left us.”
“Oh, you mean Tom Watts. You’ve got his name wrong.”
“Come to think of it, it was a German who called him that last evening, and I was misled by his pronunciation.”
Mr. Tyler’s face grew more serious.