unlighted cigar in the corner of his mouth; his chair tilted back and
his feet on a window-sill. He nodded, upon my statement of the affair
that brought me, and, without shifting his position, gave me a look of
slow but wholly friendly scrutiny over his shoulder, and bade me sit
down. I began at once to put the questions I was told to ask
him--interrogations (he seemed to believe) satisfactorily answered by
slowly and ruminatively stroking the left side of his chin with two long
fingers of his right hand, the while he smiled in genial contemplation
of a tarred roof beyond the window. Now and then he would give me a mild
and drawling word or two, not brilliantly illuminative, it may be
remarked. "Well--about that--" he began once, and came immediately to a
full stop.

"Yes?" I said, hopefully, my pencil poised.

"About that--I guess--"

"Yes, Mr. Beasley?" I encouraged him, for he seemed to have dried up
permanently.

"Well, sir--I guess--Hadn't you better see some one else about THAT?"

This with the air of a man who would be but too fluent and copious upon
any subject in the world except the one particular point.

I never met anybody else who looked so pleasantly communicative and
managed to say so little. In fact, he didn't say anything at all; and I
guessed that this faculty was not without its value in his political
career, disastrous as it had proved to his private happiness. His habit
of silence, moreover, was not cultivated: you could see that "the secret