He turned to survey the business and editorial office, and found nothing there to uplift his soul. There was a grimy railing of matched lumber, inside which a table staggered under an accumulation of exchanges and catalogues and old cuts brought in to pass the evening of their lives as paper weights. An old black-walnut desk with a bookcase in its second story tried to maintain a faded dignity beside an old safe from which the combination knob had been removed for fear somebody would shut and lock it, as once happened, with disastrous results. On the wall hung a group picture of the state legislature of 1882. One could have bedded down a cow very comfortably in the waste paper on the floor. “Simmy,” said Jake, solemnly, “she’s a hell of a messy place. Seems like we ought to kind of tidy up some for the new proprietor--or suthin’. No use, though. Hain’t no place to begin. Only thing wuth cleanin’ up is the chattel mortgage Abner Fownes holds over the place....” He turned and scowled at Simmy and smote his hands together. “By Jing!” he said, “the’s one thing we kin do--we kin wash your face. That’ll _show_.” Simmy responded by jerking his thumb toward the front door, before which two men had paused, one a diminutive hunchback, the other an enormous, fleshy individual with a beard of the sort worn, not for adornment, but as the result of indolence which regards shaving as a labor not to be endured. The pair talked with manifest excitement for a moment before they entered. “Mornin’,” said Tubal. “Mornin’,” said the corpulent one. The hunchback squinted and showed his long and very white teeth, but did not respond verbally to the greeting. “Say,” said the big man, “seen the sheriff?” “Why?” replied Tubal. “’Cause,” said Deputy Jenney, “if you hain’t nobody has.” “Since last night about nine o’clock,” said the hunchback in the unpleasant, high-pitched voice not uncommon to those cursed as he was cursed. “He got off’n the front porch last night around nine o’clock and says to his wife he was goin’ out to pump him a pail of fresh water. Didn’t put on a hat or nothin’.... That’s the last anybody’s seen of him. Yes, sir. Jest stepped into the house and out of the back door----” “Mebby he fell down the well,” said Tubal, helpfully. “His wife’s terrible upsot. I been searchin’ for him since daybreak, but not a hide or hair kin I find--nor a soul that seen him. He might of went up in a balloon right out of his back yard for all the trace he’s left.” “What d’ye mistrust?” asked Tubal. “_You_ hain’t seen him?” “No.” “Well, say, don’t make no hullabaloo about it in the paper--yit. Mebby everything’s all right.” The hunchback laughed, not a long, hearty laugh of many haw-haw-haws after the fashion of male Gibeon, but one short nasal sound that was almost a squawk. “Might be,” said Simmy, “he sneaked off to lay for one of them rum runners.”