For all the change which it brought about in Hogarty’s face that greeting might have been left unspoken. He vouchsafed the fat man’s elaborate pantomime not so much as the shadow of a smile, nodded once, thoughtfully, and let his eyes fall again to the card between his elbows on the table-top.
“Come in, Chub,” he invited shortly. “Come in.” 201 And as a clamor of many voices in the outer entrance heralded the arrival of the rest of Ogden’s crowd: “Here comes the mob now. Come in and close the door.”
Morehouse, still from head to toe a symphony in many-toned browns, shed every shred of his facetiousness at Hogarty’s crisply repeated invitation. He closed the door and snapped the catch that made it fast before he crossed, without a word, and drew a chair up to the opposite side of the desk.
“Your hurry call just caught me as I was leaving for lunch,” he explained then. “And I made pretty fair time getting down here, too. What’s the dark secret?”
The black-clad proprietor lifted his lean jaw from his hands and gazed long and steadily into the newspaper man’s eyes, picked up the bit of pasteboard which bore the latter’s own name across its front and flipped it silently across the table to him. Morehouse took it up gingerly and read it––reversed it and read again.
“Nice little touch, that,” he averred finally. “Rather neat and tasty, if I do say it myself. ‘Introducing The Pilgrim!’ Hum-m-m. You can’t quite appreciate it of course, but––oh, Flash, I wish you could have seen that big boy standing there in the door of that little backwoods tavern, just as I saw him, about a week ago! Why, he––he was–––”
“He’s come!” Hogarty cut in briefly.
Morehouse’s chin dropped. He sat with mouth agape.
“Huh?” he grunted. “He’s––he’s come where?”