By the time Mr. Chadwick got that far he was spluttering like a leaky radiator valve. By the time he had finished reading through the flossy little yarn that Billy Crandall had woven out of Jimmy Martin’s story, he looked as if he had overstayed the time limit in the hot room at a Turkish bath by fifteen minutes. His face was fiery red and the veins stood out on his forehead in knotty little lumps.
The fragmentary remarks that Mrs. Chadwick was able to extract from the almost incoherent jumble of sounds that escaped from the lips of her spouse during the reading were of such a general nature and tone that she put her hands to her ears in sheer self-defense and sat wildly tapping her feet on the floor to drown them out. The next minute her husband crashed out of the room and through the hall to his waiting car.
“Cut her loose, Martin, and drive me to the Bulletin office,” he shouted to the trim chauffeur. “I’m going over the top after that crowd of pestiferous puppies.”
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.”