“Aren't you the guy I told to come back at three?”
“It is three.”
“H'm!” The sergeant kept his eyes fixed on the papers, which rustled as he moved them from one pile to another. In the end of the room a typewriter clicked slowly and jerkily. Andrews could see the dark back of a head between bored shoulders in a woolen shirt leaning over the machine. Beside the cylindrical black stove against the wall a man with large mustaches and the complicated stripes of a hospital sergeant was reading a novel in a red cover. After a long silence the red-headed sergeant looked up from his papers and said suddenly:
“Ted.”
The man at the typewriter turned slowly round, showing a large red face and blue eyes.
“We-ell,” he drawled.
“Go in an' see if the loot has signed them papers yet.”
The man got up, stretched himself deliberately, and slouched out through a door beside the stove. The red-haired sergeant leaned back in his swivel chair and lit a cigarette.
“Hell,” he said, yawning.
The man with the mustache beside the stove let the book slip from his knees to the floor, and yawned too.