A Court of Inquiry Part 18

"I can't give you the bath," Tom answered regretfully, "because we haven't got one that goes with any room in the house. But you can have plenty of hot and cold, in cans. The room will be quiet, all right. And we always have a breeze up here, if there is one anywhere in the world.

Shall I show you?"

"Lead on," a.s.sented the stranger. He had not offered to register, though Tom had extended to him a freshly dipped pen.

"He's going to make sure first," thought Tom, recognizing a sign of the experienced traveller. He led the way himself, feeling, for some reason, unwilling to hand young Tim the key and allow him to exploit the rooms. As they mounted the stairs, Tom was rapidly considering. He had brought along three keys--rather an unusual act on his part. It was hard to say why he felt it necessary to bestow any special attention upon this guest, who certainly was by no means of an imposing appearance, and whose hot-weather dress was as careless as his manner.

He opened the door of the first room, and the stranger looked in silently. "I'll show you another before you decide," said Tom hurriedly, without waiting for a comment.

This was not his best empty room, and he felt somehow that the man who wanted a room with a bath and a breeze knew it. He led the way on along the hall to a corner room in the front. This was his second best. Tom always preferred to reserve his choicest for a chance millionaire or a possible wealthy society lady--though Heaven knew that, during the six weeks the Inn had been open, no guest distantly resembling one or the other of those desirable types had approached the little mountain hostelry.

"Anything better?" inquired the thin man, his extraordinarily quick glance covering every detail of the room like lightning, as Tom felt.

"Sure--if you want the bridal suit." Tom p.r.o.nounced it proudly, as it were a claw-hammer and white waistcoat.

"Bring her on."

Tom marched ahead to the two rooms opening on the little balcony above the side porch, a balcony which belonged to the "bridal suite" alone, and which commanded the finest view into the very heart of the mountains that the house afforded. Seeing his guest--after one look around the spotless room with its pink and white furnis.h.i.+ngs, and into the small dressing-room beyond--stride toward the outer door, Tom threw it wide.

The guest stepped out on to the balcony. Here he pulled off his hat, which he had not before removed, and let the breeze--for there was unquestionably a breeze, even on this afternoon of a day which had been one of the hottest the country had known--drift refres.h.i.+ngly against his damp brow. The zephyr was strong enough even to lift slightly the thick locks of black hair which lay above the white forehead.

"Price for this?" asked the stranger, in his abrupt way, turning back into the room.

Tom mentioned it--with a little inward hesitation. The family had differed a good deal on the question of prices for these best rooms. In his opinion that settled upon for the bridal suite was almost prohibitively high. Not a guest yet but had turned away with a sigh. For a moment he had been tempted to reduce it, but he had promised the others to stick by the decision at least through July. So he mentioned the price firmly.

The guest glanced sharply at him as he did so. There was a queer little contraction of the stranger's thin upper lip. Then he said: "I'll take 'em--for the night, and you may hold 'em for me till to-morrow night.

Tell you then whether I'll stay longer."

Tom understood, of course, that it was now a question of a satisfactory table. But here he knew he was strong. Mother Boswell's cooking--there was none better obtainable. He was already in a hurry to prove to this laconic stranger who demanded the best he had of everything, including breezes, that in the matter of food Boswell's Inn could satisfy the most exacting. Not in elaborately dressed viands of rare kitchen product, of course--that was not to be expected off here. But in temptingly cooked everyday food, and in certain extras which were Mother Boswell's specialties, and which the few people now in the Inn called for with ever-increasing zest--though they seldom deigned to send any special word of praise to the anxious cook--Boswell's needed to ask forbearance of n.o.body.

"I'll send your stuff up right away," said Tom, as the other man cast his straw hat upon a chair and went over to a washstand, where hung several snowy towels. "Have some hot water?"

"Yes--and iced."

"All right." Tom was off on the jump. It was certainly something to have rented the bridal suite even for the night, but he felt more than ordinarily curious to know who his guest was.

"Might be a travelling man," he speculated, when he had given Tim his orders, "though he doesn't exactly seem like one. But he looks like a fellow who's used to getting what he wants."

When the new guest came downstairs, at the peal of a gong through the quiet house, Tom saw him cast one keen-eyed glance in turn at each of the other occupants of the lobby, as they cl.u.s.tered about the door of the dining-room. Seven of these were women, and of that number at least five were elderly. Of the two younger ladies, neither presented any special attractiveness beyond that of entire respectability. The eighth guest was a man--a middle-aged man who was reading a book and who carried the book into the dining-room with him, where he continued to read it at his solitary table.

Tom Boswell was at the elbow of the latest arrival as he entered the dining-room, a long, low, but airy apartment, as spotless and s.h.i.+ning in its way as the bedroom upstairs had been. There was no head waiter, and Tom himself piloted the new guest to a small table by a window, looking off into the mountains on the opposite side of the house from that of the bridal suite. The women boarders were all behind him, the solitary man just across the way at a corresponding small table. Certainly the proprietor of Boswell's Inn possessed that great desideratum for such an official--tact.

Sue Boswell, aged fifteen, in a blue-and-white print frock and white ap.r.o.n so crisp that one could not discern a wrinkle in them, waited on the new guest. She did not ask him what he would have, nor present to him a card from which to select his meal. She brought him first a small cup of chicken broth, steaming hot; and though he regarded this at first as if he had no appet.i.te whatever, after the first tentative sip he went on to the bottom of the cup. When this was gone, Sue placed before him a plate of corned-beef hash, an alluring pinkness showing beneath the gratifying upper coat of brown. A small dish of cuc.u.mbers--thin, iced cuc.u.mbers, with a French dressing--accompanied the hash; and with these he was offered hot rolls so small and delicate and crisp that, after cautiously sampling the b.u.t.ter with what seemed a fastidious palate, the guest took to eating rolls as if he had seldom found anything so well worth consuming.

Something made of red raspberries and cream followed, and then half a large cantaloupe, its golden heart filled with crushed ice, was placed before him. Last appeared a cup of amber coffee. As the guest tasted this beverage, a look of complete satisfaction overspread his pale face, and he drained the cup clear and asked for more.

Presently he strolled out into the lobby. Here Tom awaited him behind the desk. The hotel register was open, and Tom's fingers suggestively held a pen. The guest obeyed the hint. At an inn so small, it certainly would be a pity for any guest not to add his name to the short list.

For it was a very short list. Although a full month had gone by since the first arrival had written her name, the bottom of the page had not been quite reached when this latest one scratched his in characters which looked quite as much like Arabic as English. When Tom came to examine the name later, he made it out to be Perkins, though it might quite as easily have been Tompkins, or Judson, or any other name which had an elevated letter somewhere in the middle. The initials were quite indecipherable. But Perkins it turned out to be, for when Tom tentatively addressed the newcomer by that appellation there was no correction made, and he continued to respond whenever so accosted.

Mr. Perkins spent the evening smoking upon the porch, his head turned toward the mountains. The next morning, when he had eaten a breakfast which included some wonderful browned griddle-cakes and syrup--another of the Inn's specialties--he strolled away into the middle distance and was observed by various of the guests, from time to time, perched about among the rocks, in idle att.i.tudes.

"He's a queer duck," observed Tom in the kitchen that day, describing Mr. Perkins to his mother. Mrs. Boswell seldom appeared beyond her special domain--that of the kitchen--but left the rest of the housekeeping to her daughters Bertha and Sue; the management of the Inn to Tom and Tim. "Silent as an owl. Seems to like his food--nothing strange about that. He doesn't act sick, exactly, but tired, or bored, or used up, somehow. Eyes like coals and sharper than a ferret's. I can't make him out. He won't talk to anybody, except now and then a word or two to Mr. Griffith. Never looks at the ladies, but I tell you they look at him. Every one of 'em has a different notion about him. Anyhow, he's taken the bridal suit for two weeks. Goes down to the post-office for his mail--gave particular orders not to have it sent up here. That's kind of funny, isn't it? Oh, I meant to tell you before: he's paid for his rooms a week in advance."

"It helps a little," said his sister Bertha. She was twenty-five years old, and if any one of this family had the responsibility of the success of Boswell's Inn heavily and anxiously at heart, it was Bertha. "But it can't make up the difference. Here's July half over, and not a dozen people in the house. What can be the matter? Isn't everything all right?"

"Sure it's all right," insisted Tom. "We just haven't got known, that's all."

"But how are we going to get known, if n.o.body comes? Our advertis.e.m.e.nt in the city papers costs dreadfully, and it doesn't seem to bring anybody."

"Now see here," said Tom firmly, "don't you go to getting discouraged.

This is our first season. We can't expect to do much the first season.

We're prepared for that."

But he realized, quite as clearly as his sister, that they had not been prepared for so complete a failure as they were making. Boswell's Inn stood only sixteen miles away from a large city, a great Western railroad centre, into which, early and late, thousands of tourists were pouring. The road out into the mountains was a good one, the trip easy enough for the owners of motor cars, of whom the city held enough to make a continuous procession all the way if only they could be headed in the right direction. But how to head them? That was what Tom couldn't figure out.

On the third evening after Mr. Perkins's arrival, Tom, strolling gloomily out upon the porch to see if any one was lingering there to prevent his closing up, discovered Perkins sitting alone, smoking. There had not been a new arrival that day; worse, one of the elderly ladies had gone away. She had departed reluctantly, but her absence counted just the same, and Tom was missing her as he had never expected to miss any elderly lady with iron-gray curls and a cast in one eye.

"Nice night," observed Tom to Mr. Perkins.

"First-cla.s.s."

"Getting cooled off a bit up here?"

"Pretty well."

"Are, you--having everything you want?"

Tom asked the question with some diffidence. It was a matter of regret with him that he couldn't afford yet to put young Tim into b.u.t.tons, but without them he was sure the lad made as alert a bellboy and porter as could be asked.

"Nothing to complain of."

Tom wished Mr. Perkins wouldn't be so taciturn. The proprietor of the Inn That Couldn't Get a Start was feeling so blue to-night that speech with some one besides his depressed family was almost a necessity. He couldn't talk with the women; Mr. Griffith, though kindly enough, had his nose forever buried in a book. Perkins looked as if he could talk if he would, and have something to say, too. Tom tried to think of an observation which would draw this silent man out. But quite suddenly, and greatly to Tom's surprise, Mr. Perkins began to draw Tom out. Even so, his questions were like shots from a gun, so brief and to the point were they.

"Doing any advertising?" broke the silence first, from a corner of the thin mouth. Perkins's cigar had been s.h.i.+fted to the opposite corner. He did not look at Tom, but continued to gaze off toward a certain curious effect of moonlight against the rocky sides of the canyon.

"We have a card in all the city papers."

"Any specials? Write-ups?"

"Well, this is our first season, and we didn't feel as if we could afford to pay for that."

"No pulls, eh?"

"You mean----?"

"No friends among the newspaper men?"

"I don't know one. They don't seem to come up here. I wish they would."

"Ever ask one?"