As he waited before the warrant clerk's desk he saw Mr. Baxter, on his way to the door, brush by Foley, and in the moment of passing he saw Foley's lips move. He did not hear Foley's words. They were two, and were: "First round!" A few minutes later Tom was led down a stairway, through a corridor and locked in a cell. Chapter XX TOM HAS A CALLER Late in the afternoon, as Tom lay stretched in glowering melancholy on the greasy, dirt-browned board that did service as chair and bed to the transitory tenants of the cell, steps paused in the corridor without and a key rattled in his door. He rose dully out of his dejection. A scowling officer admitted a man, round and short and with side whiskers, and locked the door upon his back. "This is a pretty how-to-do!" growled the man, coming forward. Tom stared at his visitor. "Why, Mr. Driscoll!" he cried. "That's who the most of my friends say I am," the contractor admitted gruffly. He deposited himself upon the bench that had seated and bedded so much unwashed misfortune, and, his back against the cement wall, turned his sour face about the bare room. "This is what I call a pretty poor sort of hospitality to offer a visitor," he commented, in his surly voice. "Not even a chair to sit on." "There is also the floor; you may take your choice," Tom returned, nettled by the other's manner. He himself took the bench. Mr. Driscoll stared at him with blinking eyes, and he stared back defiantly. In Tom's present mood of wrath and depression his temper was tinder waiting another man's spark. "Huh!" Mr. Driscoll ran his pudgy forefinger easefully about between his collar and his neck, and removing his spectacles mopped his purple face. "What's this funny business you've been up to now?" he asked. "What do you mean?" Tom demanded, his irritation mounting. "You ought to read the papers and keep posted on what you do. I just saw a _Star_. There's half a page of your face, and about a pint of red ink." Tom groaned, and his jaws clamped ragefully. "What I read gave me the impression you'd been having a sort of private Fourth of July celebration," Mr. Driscoll pursued. Tom turned on the contractor half savagely. "See here! I don't know what you came here for, but if it was for this kind of talk--well, you can guess how welcome you are!" Mr. Driscoll emitted a little chuckling sound, or Tom thought for an instant he did. But a glance at that sour face, with its straight pouting mouth, corrected Tom's ears. "Now, what was your fool idea in blowing up the Avon?" Tom uprose wrathfully. "Do you mean to say you believe the lies those blackguards told this morning?" "I only know what I read in the papers." "If you swallow everything you see in the papers, you must have an awful maw!" "Yes, I suppose you have got some sort of a story you put up." Tom glared at his pudgy visitor who questioned with such an exasperating presumption. "Did I ask you here?" he demanded.