e managing editor, was coiled up at his desk, wearing a look
of patient endurance on his face. Harty, the telegraph editor, was
trying to do his work--trying, I say, because the orator was booming
away like a bittern within three feet of him and Harty plainly was
pestered and fretful. Really the only person in sight who seemed
entertained was Sidley, the exchange editor, a young man with hair that
had turned white before its time and in his eye the devil-driven look of
a man who drinks hard, not because he wants to drink but because he
can't help drinking. Sidley, as I was to find out later, had less cause
to care for the old man than anybody about the shop, for he used to
disarrange Sidley's neatly piled exchanges, pawing through them for his
favorite papers. But Sidley could forget his own grievances in watchful
enjoyment of the dumb sufferings of Harty, whom he hated, as I came to
know, with the blind hate a dipsomaniac often has for any mild and
perfectly harmless individual.

As I stood there taking in the picture, the speaker, sensing a
stranger's presence, faced clear about and saw me. He nodded with a
grave courtesy, and then paused a moment as though expecting that one of
the others would introduce us. None of the others did introduce us
though, so he went ahead talking about Albert Sidney Johnston's death,
and I turned away. I stopped by Devore's desk.

"Who is he?" I asked.

"That," he said, with a kind of leashed and restrained ferocity in his
voice, "is Major Putnam P. Stone--and the P stands for Pest, which is
his middle name--late of the Southern Confederacy."

"Picturesque-looking old fellow, isn't he?" I said.

"Picturesque old nuisance," he said, and jabbed at his scalp with his
pencil as though he meant to puncture his skull. "Wait until you've been
here a few weeks and you'll have another name for him."

"Well, anyway, he's got a good carrying voice," I said, rather at a loss
to understand Devore's bitterness.

"Great," he mocked venomously; "you can hear it a mile. I hear it in my
sleep. So will you when you get to know him, the old bore!"

In due time I did get to know Major Stone well. He was dignified,
tiresome, conversational, gentle mannered and, I think, rather lonely.
By driblets, a scrap here and a scrap there, I learned something about
his private life. He came from the extreme eastern end of the state. He
belonged to an old family. His grandfather--or maybe it was his
great-grand-