“The least I can do,” he bellowed, “is tell you to get to hell back to Frisco, you and your numbskull—”
I got up and said unpleasantly:
“I’m at the Great Western Hotel. Don’t bother me unless you want to talk sense for a change.”
I went out of the bedroom and down the stairs. The secretary hovered around the bottom step, smiling apologetically.
“A fine old rowdy,” I growled.
“A remarkably vital personality,” he murmured.
At the office of the Herald , I hunted up the murdered man’s secretary. She was a small girl of nineteen or twenty with wide chestnut eyes, light brown hair and a pale pretty face. Her name was Lewis.
She said she hadn’t known anything about my being called to Personville by her employer.
“But then,” she explained, “ Mr. Willsson always liked to keep everything to himself as long as he could. It was—I don’t think he trusted anybody here, completely.”
“Not you?”
She flushed and said:
“No. But of course he had been here such a short while and didn’t know any of us very well.”