A Court of Inquiry Part 19

"I don't know any," repeated Tom.

A short laugh, more like a grunt, was Perkins's reply. Tom didn't see what there was to laugh at in the misfortune of having no acquaintance among the writing fellows. He waited eagerly for the next question. It was worth a good deal to him merely to have this outsider show a spark of interest in the fortunes of Boswell's Inn.

"When did you open up?" It came just as he feared Perkins was going to drop the subject.

"The third of June."

"Own the house?"

"No--lease it, cheap. It's an old place, but we put all we could afford into freshening it up."

"Cook a permanent one?"

The form of the question perplexed Tom for an instant, but it presently resolved itself, and he was grinning as he replied: "Sure she is. It's my mother. Do you like her cooking?"

"A-1."

Ah, Tom would tell his mother that! The young man flushed slightly in the darkness of the porch. It was almost the first compliment that had been paid her, and she worked like a slave, too.

"Little waitress your sister?"

"Yes. Sue's young, but we think she does pretty well."

"Delivers the goods. Housekeeper a member of the family, too?"

"Yes--and Tim's my brother. Oh, it's all in the family. The only trouble is----" he hesitated.

"Lack of patronage?"

"We can't keep open much longer if things don't improve." The moment the words were out Tom regretted them. He didn't know how he had come to speak them. He hadn't meant to give this fact away. Certainly there had been nothing particularly sympathetic in the tone of Perkins's choppy questions. But the other man's next words knocked his regrets out of his mind in a jiffy.

"Could you entertain a dozen men at supper to-morrow night if they came in a bunch without warning?"

"Give us the chance!"

"Chance might happen--better be prepared. I expect to be away over to-morrow night myself, but have the tip that a crowd may be coming out to sample the place. It may be a mistake--don't know."

"We'll be ready. Would they come by train?"

"Don't ask me--none of my picnic. Merely overheard the thing suggested."

And Perkins, rising, cast away the close-smoked stub of his cigar.

"Good-night," said he, carelessly enough, and strolled in through the wide hall of the old stone house. Tom looked after him as he mounted the stairs. The young innkeeper's spirits had gone up with a bound. A dozen men to supper! Well--he thought they could entertain them. He would go and tell his mother and Bertha on the instant; the prospect would cheer them immensely. He wondered how or where Perkins had overheard this rumour. At the post-office, most likely. It was a gossipy place, the centre of the tiny burg at the foot of the mountain, an eighth of a mile away, where a dozen small shops and half a hundred houses strung along the one small street, at the end of which the two daily trains made their half-minute stops.

The dozen men had come and gone. There were fourteen of them, to be exact, and they had climbed out of a couple of big touring cars with sounds of hilarity which made the elderly ladies jump in their chairs.

They had swarmed over the place as if they owned it, had talked and laughed and joked and shouted, all in a perfectly agreeable way which woke up Boswell's as if it were in the centre of somewhere instead of off in the mountains. They had scrawled fourteen vigorous scrawls upon the register and made it necessary to turn the page, this of itself affording the clerk a satisfaction quite out of proportion to the apparent unimportance of the incident. Then they had gone gayly in to supper, had sat about two stainless tables close by the open windows, and had been waited upon by both Sue and Tim in such alert fas.h.i.+on that their plates arrived almost before they had unfurled their napkins.

Out in the kitchen, crimson-cheeked and solicitous, Mrs. Boswell had sent in relays of broiled chicken, young and tender, browned as only artists of her rank can brown them, flanked by potatoes cooked in a way known only to herself. These were two of her "specialties," which the elderly ladies were accustomed to enjoy without mentioning it. Pickles and jellies such as the fourteen men had tasted only in childhood accompanied these dishes, and the little hot rolls came on in piles which melted away before the delighted attacks of the hungry guests; so that the kitchen itself became alarmed, and cut the elderly ladies a trifle short, at which complaints were promptly filed, though it was the first time such a shortage had occurred.

Other toothsome dishes followed and were partaken of with such zest and so many frank expressions of approval that Sue and Tim carried to the kitchen reports which forced their mother to ask them to stop, lest she lose her head. When the amber coffee with a fine cheese and crisp toasted wafers ended the meal, the guests were in such a state of satisfaction that Tom, though he did not know it, had acquired with them his first "pull."

He did not know it--not then. He only knew that they were very cordial with him, asking him a good many interested questions, and that one requested to be shown rooms, remarking that his wife and children might like to run out for a little while before the summer was over. Most of them looked back at the Inn as the automobiles bore them away, and one waved his cigar genially at Tom standing on the top step.

He was standing on the top step again the next morning when Mr. Perkins returned. Tom was wis.h.i.+ng Perkins had been there the night before, to see confirmed the truth of the rumour he had reported.

"Well, we had the crowd here last night," was Tom's greeting, as Perkins's sharp black eyes looked up at him from the bottom step.

"So I see." Perkins held up a morning paper. The inevitable cigar was in his mouth. His face indicated no particular interest. He went along into the house as Tom grasped the paper. So he saw! What did Perkins mean by that? It couldn't be that any of that party of men had, unsolicited, taken the trouble to----

But they had, or one of them had. In a fairly conspicuous position on one of the local pages of the best city daily was an item of at least a dozen lines setting forth the fact that a party of prominent men, including several newspaper men, had taken supper the night before at Boswell's Inn, Mount o' Pines, and had found that place decidedly attractive. The paragraph stated that such a supper was seldom found at summer hotels, added that the air and the view were worth a long trip to obtain when the city was sweltering with heat, and ended by speaking of the prime condition of the roads leading to the Inn. Altogether, it was such an item as Tom had often longed to see, and the reading of it went to his head. When, ten minutes later, Tim, coming up from the post-office with the mail and another of the morning papers, excitedly called Tom's attention to a second paragraph headed, "Have You Had a Supper at Boswell's Inn?" Tom became positively delirious.

"It pays to set it up to a bunch like that," was Perkins's comment when Tom showed him this second free advertis.e.m.e.nt.

"But I didn't treat them. They paid their bills," cried the young host.

"Charge your usual price?"

"Sure. We didn't have anything extra--except the cheese. Tim drove ten miles for that."

"Usual price was all the treat those fellows needed."

"Do you mean you don't think I charge enough?" Tom's eyes opened wide.

He had felt as if he were robbing those men when he counted up the sum total.

"Ever dine at the Arcadia?--or the Princess?"

"No."

"They do."

Tom did not know the prices at these imposing popular hotels in the nearby city, but he supposed they were high. He felt as if he were the greenest innkeeper who ever invited the patronage of city guests.

"Would you advise me to put up the price?" Tom asked presently, with some hesitation.

Perkins glanced at him out of those worn, brilliant, black eyes of his, which looked as if they had seen more of the world than Tom's ever would see in the longest life he could live, though Perkins himself could hardly be over forty, perhaps not quite that.

"Not yet, son," said he. "By and by--yes. But keep up the quality now--and then."

That evening a young man, whom Tom recognized as one of the party of the night before, the one who had waved to him as he had driven away, appeared again. He came in a runabout this time and brought two women, who proved to be his mother and sister. The young man himself--Mr.

Haskins--smiled genially at Tom, and said by way of explanation:

"I liked your place so well I brought them up to see if my fairy tales were true."

Upon which Tom naturally did his best to make the fairy tales seem true, and thought, by the signs he noted, that he had succeeded.

During the following week three or four others of the men of the original fourteen came up to Boswell's or sent small parties. Evidently the flattering paragraphs in the two dailies had also made some impression on people eager to get away from the intense heat of a season more than ordinarily trying. They found the air stirring upon the porches and through the rooms at the Inn; and they found--which was, of course, the greater attraction--a table so inviting with appetizing food, and an unpretentious service so satisfactory, that mouth-to-mouth advertising of the little new resort, that most-to-be-desired means of becoming known, began, gradually but surely, to tell.