Bane would like ter see you, suh."

"Show them in, Jerry."

The man who entered first upon this invitation was a dapper little
gentleman with light-blue eyes and a Vandyke beard. He wore a frock
coat, patent leather shoes, and a Panama hat. There were crow's-feet
about his eyes, which twinkled with a hard and, at times, humorous
shrewdness. He had sloping shoulders, small hands and feet, and walked
with the leisurely step characteristic of those who have been reared
under hot suns.

Carteret gave his hand cordially to the gentleman thus described.

"How do you do, Captain McBane," he said, turning to the second visitor.

The individual thus addressed was strikingly different in appearance
from his companion. His broad shoulders, burly form, square jaw, and
heavy chin betokened strength, energy, and unscrupulousness. With the
exception of a small, bristling mustache, his face was clean shaven,
with here and there a speck of dried blood due to a carelessly or
unskillfully handled razor. A single deep-set gray eye was shadowed by a
beetling brow, over which a crop of coarse black hair, slightly streaked
with gray, fell almost low enough to mingle with his black, bushy
eyebrows. His coat had not been brushed for several days, if one might
judge from the accumulation of dandruff upon the collar, and his
shirt-front, in the middle of which blazed a showy diamond, was
plentifully stained with tobacco juice. He wore a large slouch hat,
which, upon entering the office, he removed and held in his hand.

Having greeted this person with an unconscious but quite perceptible
diminution of the warmth with which he had welcomed the other, the major
looked around the room for seats for his visitors, and perceiving only
one chair, piled with exchanges, and a broken stool propped against the
wall, pushed a button, which rang a bell in the hall, summoning the
colored porter to his presence.

"Jerry," said the editor when his servant appeared, "bring a couple of
chairs for these gentlemen."

While they stood waiting, the visitors congratulated the major on the
birth of his child, which had been announced in the Morning Chronicle,
and which the prominence of the family made in some degree a matter of
public interest.

"And now that you have a son, major," remarked the gentleman first
described, as he lit one of the major's cigars, "you'll be all the more
interested in doing something to make this town fit to live in, which is
what