Though it was not quite nine o’clock when Horace Chadwick arrived at the Bulletin office he found eight other apoplectic prominent citizens gathered in excited colloquy in the ante-room to the office of Richard Chilvers, the owner and editor-in-chief of the paper. Col. Hannibal Roundtree, a handsome and stately old gentleman with a militant imperial and a flowing white moustache, was addressing remarks to a thoroughly scared young man who had thoughtlessly confessed a minute before that he was Mr. Chilver’s secretary.
“You listen to me, young man,” he was saying. “You march into that office there and get Dick Chilvers on that private wire of his and tell him that if he’s a gentleman he’ll drop his breakfast and come down heah and meet a delegation of irate and fightin’ mad citizens of this community face to face, instead skulkin’ in the trenches.”
The youthful secretary vanished through a swinging door marked “Private” and Colonel Roundtree turned to his friends.
“Damned, rascally, cowardly hounds—that’s what I call ’em. They print a dastardly canard like that and then they skedaddle in the face of the common enemy.”
“You’re talking, colonel,” broke in Mr. Chadwick. “I haven’t met anybody I know, but I’ll bet we’re the laughing stock of the whole town.”
“I can’t take that bet,” responded Col. Roundtree bitterly. “Unfortunately for my peace of mind I have met some of my friends. Why, gentlemen, we should take matters into our own hands, mount a machine gun right heah at this door and keep ’em from gettin’ out another edition of this lyin’, treachous, no-account sheet.”
There were murmurs of approval of these belligerent sentiments from the little group of protestants which had just been increased by the arrival of Jonathan Wilde, a thin dyspeptic looking man with a disappearing Adam’s apple and of Henry Quinby Blugsden, a former United States senator who carried the dignity of America’s foremost debating society about with him on all occasions.
“Legal measures, my dear colonel,” said the former senator, “are, I think, the soundest in such an emergency. So far as I am concerned my suit will be filed this afternoon. I shall name the sum of $250,000 as insufficient damages for the mental pain I have already undergone. Mrs. Blugsden, as many of you know, is a woman of decided prejudices and a strong mind.”
“She hasn’t a shade on my wife,” remarked Mr. Wilde. “She’s got two doctors working on her this minute. Went right off into hysterics at the breakfast table and began smashing china.”