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"Yes, forty-nine," he repeated. The proprietor called a stout negro porter, waiter, and bell-hop all combined in one, who led us upstairs. "Fohty-nine, sah," he pointed out, as Kennedy dropped a dime into his ready palm. The negro left us and as Craig started to enter, I objected, "But, Craig, it was fifty-nine, not forty-nine. This is the wrong room." "I know it," he replied.
To cover my confusion I suggested that poets enjoy a certain license, but I was honestly sorry for Dutch. If he was not the oldest living bell-hop, he was at least entitled to honorable mention among the most ancient veterans of the calling, vocation, or avocation of the bell-hopper. I bade him cheer up and passed on.
"Here's ten dollars. Please take it aw please, Charley." "All right; anything to oblige." "What 've you got in sight in the job line?" "Well, there's a chance at night clerking in a little hotel where I was a bell-hop long time ago. The night clerk's going to get through, but I don't know just when prob'ly in a week or two." "Well, keep after it.
Hazzard is managing this very affair manager, isn't that it?" "I'm bell-hop for the whole crowd. My sister plays Thomasine, her steady is Tweenwayes, and my Mother's a director in the hospital. Fix it up to suit yourselves; you'll see that I'm every one's goat." Unfortunately, it seems that she has just promised to sign a contract with the Alcazar people." "Oh, shucks!
I had identified him as an old Tyringham bell-hop, known familiarly as Dutch, before he heard my step and sprang to his feet, grabbing a pitchfork whose prongs he presented threateningly. "Oh, it's you, sir," he faltered, dropping the implement. "Excuse me, sir!" "What's your trouble, Dutch? You're not expecting burglars, are you?" "Well, no, sir, but things on the place ain't what they wuz.
And say, if your man's one that hangs out here you can bank on Squint to give you the story of his life. Just step in and send a bell-hop after Squint. Say I want him." And inside of two minutes we had Squint with us. He remembers me too, and when he finds I'm an old friend of Whitey Weeks he opens up. "Yes, I've seen that party around more or less," says he. "Creighton, eh? Well, he's no guest.
He was apparently an arrival from one of the night trains; while he was slamming the cab door a bell-hop from the Marlborough skated across the sidewalk, snatched a couple of grips from the front seat of the cab and disappeared with them. Humped and shivering, I was almost at the traveler's elbow when he turned and felt in his pockets for the money to pay the cab driver.
He retied the bundle, took his room-key from the hand of the smiling clerk and started up the stairway, humming a tune under his breath as he went. At the first turn he stopped and looked back. "Send the bell-hop up to wake me at seven," he called down to the clerk. "I'm going to take a much-needed nap and it'll be all your life's worth to let me miss that train!"
He hardly opens his mouth on the way up to the hotel, but trails along silent, his eyes fixed starey, like he was thinkin' deep. "Well," says I, after a bell-hop had shown us into one of the Tillington's air-shaft rooms and gone for ten cents' worth of ice water, "it looks like you had the Big Boss almost buffaloed with that pirate tale of yours." Rupert don't enthuse much at that.
The first thing that Horizon did upon installing himself in the large, spacious room with an alcove, was to put out into the corridor at the door of the room six pairs of magnificent shoes, saying to the bell-hop who ran up in answer to the bell: "Immediately all should be cleaned! So it should shine like a mirror! They call you Timothy, I think?
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