--W.R. Le ffacase. Gootes, noting my
trepidation, put on the brogue of a burlesque Irishman.

"Is it afraid of Himself you are, me boy? Sure, think no more of it.
Faith, and wasnt he born Billy Casey; no better than the rest of us for
all his mother was a Clancy and related to the Finnegans? He's written
so often about coming from noble Huguenot stock he almost believes it
himself, but the Huguenots were dirty Protestants and when his time
comes W R'll send for the priest and take the last sacraments like the
true son of the Church he is in his heart. So buck up, me boy, and come
in and view the biggest faker in journalism."

But Gootes' flippancy reassured me no more than did the bare sunlit
office behind the door. I had somehow, perhaps from the movies, expected
to see an editor's desk piled with copypaper while he himself used
halfadozen telephones at once, simultaneously making incomprehensible
gestures at countless underlings. But Mr Le ffacase's desk was nude
except for an enameled snuffbox and a signed photograph of a president
whose administration had been subjected daily to the editor's bitterest
jabs. On the walls hung framed originals of the more famous political
cartoons of the last quartercentury, but neither telephone nor scrap of
manuscript was in evidence.

But who could examine that office with detached scrutiny while William
Rufus Le ffacase occupied it? Somnolent in a leather armchair, he opened
tiny, sunken eyes to regard us with less than interest as we entered.
Under a shiny alpaca coat he wore an oldfashioned collarless shirt whose
neckband was fastened with a diamond stud. Neither collar nor tie
competed with the brilliance of this flashing gem resting in a shaven
stubblefold of his draped neck. His face was remarkably long, his
upperlip stretching interminably from a mouth looking to have been
freshly smeared with vaseline to a nose not unlike a golfclub in shape.
From the snuffbox on his desk, which I'd imagined a pretty ornament or
receptacle for small objects, he scooped with a flat thumb a conical
mound of graybrown dust and this, with a sweeping upward motion, he
pushed into a gaping nostril.

"Chief, this is Albert Weener."

"How do, Mr Weener. Gootes, who the bloody hell is Weener?"

"Why, Chief, he's the guy who put the stuff on the grass."

"Oh." He surveyed me with the attention due a worthy but not
particularly valuable specimen. "You bit the dog, ay, Weener?"

Gootes burst i