"They left no address. They never do, sir, when they go for peace and quiet. Good day, sir."
With which, actually, that sebacious, ostentatious, fallacious importation had hung up on him.
To Pape's daily inquiries since Jasper had replied with consistent politeness, if with consistent lack of information. The Westerner hated him for his very perfection in his part; was inclined to the belief that America was no place for an intelligence limited to being a butler.
What about his--Why-Not's--peace and quiet? Wasn't _he_ entitled to any such? Indignation had flung with him out of the booth that first morning; had matched his pace since; was riding with him to-day.
In the interval Pape had made efforts other than over the Sturgis telephone to locate geographically the rural resting-place mentioned all too vaguely by Jasper. His first visit to that mountainous district known to the Metropolitan Police as "below the dead-line" was not in the squaring of certain overdue accounts of his own which had been the basic impulse of his Eastern exile, but in the hope of locating the other members of that Zaza box-party.
In a cloud-piercer near the corner of William and Wall Streets he found the office suite occupied by ex-Judge Samuel Allen and associated attorneys, evidently an affiliation of standing "at the bar"--a phrase which, since Volstead, is no longer misunderstood as meaning anything but "in the Law." He gained admittance into the reception room, but, so far as achieving audience with the head of the firm, the legal lair proved more impregnable than the ranger-guarded Yellowstone to a tusk-hunter.
The "line-fence" was ridden by thick-rouged, thin-bloused office girls who doubtless had been instructed that all unexpected callers were suspicious characters and to be treated accordingly. Once the judge was in court, which court no one seemed to know. Pape left his name. On a second visit he was allowed to "dig his spurs" into chair rungs most of an afternoon under the hopeful glances of the "dolls," while awaiting the end of an alleged conference, only to be told with none-too-regretful apologies that Mr. Allen, having been called to attend the directors of the Hardened Steel Corporation, had departed without knowing that Mr. Pape awaited him. A third time----