Page:The Black Cat November 1916.djvu/29



BY G. B. GRANT

HE sign on the door read, The. Underneath in smaller letters were the words, Divorce Cases A Specialty. The building was dingy and the corridors showed strong evidences of neglect.

The man in the hall plainly did not belong. From the "tissue weight fall soft" to the neatly shod feet, he was immaculate. The gray suit with the gardenia in the buttonhole, seemed to recoil in disgust from the dry, musty odor that pervaded the place; the irreproachable linen of his attire looked whiter for its surroundings. His nostrils twitching disdainfully and the clean-cut patrician face with its thin, cruel lips, showed the distaste he felt for the work before him. He reluctantly opened the door and went in.

The office bore out the promise implied by the rest of the building. It was lighted by two dingy windows, through which the sun was trying in vain to shine. A typewriter desk, minus the typewriter, occupied the room. Three or four chairs, timeworn and dilapidated, stood along the wall, and a calendar bearing a date of two years previous hung between the windows. A door at the back of the room bore the inscription, Mr. Kimbarton, Private, and from behind this issued raucous snores with steady monotony.

The visitor rapped smartly on the desk with his cane, waited a moment, rapped again, and then a third time.

The snores ceased, the door opened, and from within came a short, pudgy figure dressed in a soiled and wrinkled suit of blue serge. He stood in the doorway for a moment, sleepily rubbing his eyes, his pasty face moist with perspiration.

"Whadya want?" he growled surlily.

"Mr. Kimbarton, I take it?" remarked the visitor.

"You take it right then, an' I don't need no books, an' no insurance, an' you gotta fat lotta nerve a-comin' into a busy man's office an' poundin' on his furniture with a stick. Whadya want anyway?"

"I thought," said the stranger, picking his stick up from the desk where he had laid it, "that this was a detective agency. I see that I was mistaken. It's a school for bad manners; and, as I don't feel that I need any lessons in that line, I will bid you good-day."

He started for the door, but the other forestalled him.