So, when Walsh of the Despatch was conducted by Garrett, the butler of Mr. Hallowell, upstairs to that gentlemen’s library, he found a group of reporters already entrenched. At the door that opened from the library to the bedroom, the butler paused. “What paper shall I say?” he asked.
“The Despatch,” Walsh told him.
The servant turned quickly and stared at Walsh.
He appeared the typical butler, an Englishman of over forty, heavily built, soft-moving, with ruddy, smooth-shaven cheeks and prematurely gray hair. But now from his face the look of perfunctory politeness had fallen; the subdued voice had changed to a snarl that carried with it the accents of the Tenderloin.
“So, you’re the one, are you?” the man muttered.
For a moment he stood scowling; insolent, almost threatening, and then, once more, the servant opened the door and noiselessly closed it behind him.
The transition had been so abrupt, the revelation so unexpected, that the men laughed.
“I don’t blame him!” said young Irving. “I couldn’t find a single fact in the whole story. How’d your people get it—pretty straight?”
“Seemed straight to us,” said Walsh.
“Well, you didn’t handle it that way,” returned the other. “Why didn’t you quote Rainey or Gaylor? It seems to me if a man’s on the point of death”—he lowered his voice and glanced toward the closed door—“that his private doctor and his lawyer might know something about it.”