When the police asked her about the man’s appearance her description was meager. He had worn the collar of his overcoat turned up and kept on his hat. All that she could make out in the brief moment when he crossed the hall to the stairs was that his eyes looked bright and dark, that he wore glasses, and that he had a large aquiline nose. She thought he had a white mustache, but on this point was uncertain, as the upturned collar hid the lower part of his face. Babbitts, who reported the affair for the _Dispatch_ and for the Whitney office on the side, questioned the girl carefully. She was stupid, not long landed, and could only be sure of the nose and the glasses. But one thing he elicited from her was an important touch in this impressionist picture—the man was small. When he passed her in the hall she noticed that he was not so tall as she was, and he moved quickly and lightly as he went up the stairs. On the third floor front were two rooms, one vacant, one occupied by a boy named Salinger, a clerk in a near-by publishing house. Salinger came in at half-past ten, and as he passed Ford’s door heard in the room men’s voices, one loud, one low. A sentence in the raised voice—it did not sound like Ford’s—caught his ear. The tone denoted anger, likewise the words: "I’ve come for something more than talk. I’ve had enough of that." Knowing Ford was out of work he supposed he was having a row with a dun, and passed on to his own room, where he went to bed and read a novel. He was so engrossed in this that he said he would not have heard anyone come or go in the hall, but the landlady, who with her daughter occupied the parlor on the ground floor, at a little before eleven heard steps descending the stairs and the front door open and close. It wasn’t till nearly two in the morning that Salinger was wakened by a feeble knocking. He jumped up, and before he could reach the door heard a heavy fall in the passage. There, prostrate by the sill, lay Ford, unconscious, his head laid open by a deep wound. Salinger dragged him back to his room, then roused the landlady, who sent for a doctor. He told Babbitts that the place gave no evidence of a struggle, the droplight was burning, a chair drawn close to it, and a book lying face down on the table as if Ford had been reading when the stranger interrupted him. On the floor near a desk standing between the two windows, a trickle of blood showed where Ford had fallen, suggesting that the attack had been made from behind as he stood over the desk. The doctor pronounced the injury serious. The blow had been delivered on the back of the head, and Ford’s condition was critical.