Chapter 5

One of my few friends in that oddly Old-World city on the St. Lawrence was a drunkard and a derelict scholar named Donald Christie, who in his periods of sobriety was a proof-reader on the _Herald_, where his lapses of character were condoned because of a scholarship that was unique in newspaper circles and a knowledge that seemed equaled only in the encyclopedias. He was a son of Auld Reekie and claimed to be an honor graduate of the University of Edinburgh. But he had been a drifter, apparently, for the greater p…