It was not easy for Myron, as it would have been for Ora, to enact nervous excitement, but he would try anything for J. Hector Warlock. He knocked, and when Mr. Dumbolton came, in shirt sleeves and slipperless grey woollen socks, Myron croaked, 'Say, Al, gee, the sheriff is downstairs and he wants to see you! Looks awful mysterious, and like he was sore about something. I told him I thought you was out. You could sneak down the back way through the kitchen.'
Mr. Dumbolton gaped. His frightened voice sounded like steam from a locomotive. 'D-did he say why he wanted to see me?'
'No, but he sure did insist.'
'Oh, God, I might of known! What a fool I--Myron! I'll skip out the back way. Catch late freight at the crossing. You hold my valise. Tell the damn sheriff you can't find me. Make out like you're looking for me. Keep him busy! I'll make it quick!'
J. Hector Warlock, in a voice convincingly changed from his natural humorous basso-profundo, growled, 'You will not! You won't make it at all, Dumbolton!'
While the victim shrank from a big red sofa-cushion into a very little red sofa-cushion, J. Hector pushed past Myron and stood grinning down at Mr. Dumbolton, who stared and wriggled, then groaned, 'Well, I'm a sock-eyed son of a gun! I might of known! I thought you wasn't coming for a week! If I'd of known you was within fifty miles, I'd of known it was you, you old potato-face! I'll get you for this!'
The two men pounded each other's backs, most affectionately and painfully.
'How about a little devotion to the Goddess of Fortune, this evening? How about making the aces gallop?' suggested J. Hector. 'No, Myron; wait a minute.'
'Sounds elegant to me,' said Dumbolton.
'Then look, Myron. Who's in the house that's good for an innocent, friendly little test of skill . . . with dynamite in the gloves?'
'Mr. Wood Harris is here from Hartford--boots and shoes?'
'Fine. Yes. I've played with him. Ask him to come up to my room in half an hour. By the way, you've given me the double room with the private bath as usual, I hope, Cap'n.'
'Why!' Hurt and a little indignant. 'Sure! Of course, Mr. Warlock! Number 4.'
Thirty years hence, Myron would remember, as it was indeed his business to remember, that J. Hector Warlock had been pleased to play cards with Mr. Woodland F. Harris; that he had the room with private bath; and that he--most extraordinary and inexplicable thing about this great man--actually preferred tea to coffee for breakfast.
Only there was no room with private bath in the American House, Black Thread. The bath was really one of the four public tubs, a 'down-the-hall-bath' as it was called. But it did have an entrance not only from the hall but from Double Room 4, and some six or eight times a year it was demanded as a private bath, it was called a private bath, and thereby, magically, as in theology, it became a private bath.
Mr. Warlock was proceeding, 'Get hold of Harris, boy. Then chase out or send that fresh brat of a brother of yours out and see if you can get hold of Cal Bigus and Ed Stuart and that livery-stable keeper, what's his name? for a game this evening. And shoot a bottle of Old Taylor and plenty of glasses and ice water up to the room. Here. Don't waste this. Invest it in New York Central Preferred.'
He handed Myron a whole quarter. The largest tip Myron had ever received was fifty cents; that was from a man who had stayed two weeks and who as he had developed symptoms of delirium tremens, persecution mania, arthritis, acid stomach, and nympholepsy, had required some attention. His normal tip was ten cents--no, his normal tip, for dragging a leaden bag upstairs and bringing a pitcher of ice water, was nothing; ten cents was a New Yorker's tip.
'Oh, gee, thanks! I'll send Ora--my brother. I'll be right back up with your valise.'
He was not going to miss the chance of as much time as possible with his idol, J. Hector, who had, to Myron, all the subtlety of Miss Absolom, and considerably more point. He bullied his father into leaving a game of casino in the bar and coming in to take the desk. He bribed Ora to search for Cal and Ed and the livery-stable man; bribed him with fifteen cents out of the quarter. . . . Perhaps Ora was right in saying that Myron was born to business, not the arts, for even in this moment of excitement at J. Hector's golden coming and of strain in getting the alienated Ora to do anything whatever, Myron did not fail to make his righteous, capitalistic profit of ten cents.
He summoned Mr. Woodland F. Harris from the bar, and tugged J. Hector's mighty suitcase up to Room 4. As long as he could without feeling intrusive, he hung about watching J. Hector unpack, getting a foretaste of the luxuries in the Great World to which he hoped some day to belong.
J. Hector had such accessories to living as Myron had hitherto seen only on the bureau of Miss Absolom, and J. Hector's were richer, more male. From his bag, while Myron stood at the door and goggled, J. Hector produced not one but two hair brushes, thick, heavy, without handles. 'Military brushes!' throbbed Myron. He had read of them in advertisements in the New York papers.
And shoes with dinguses in them, like pale-yellow wooden feet, to keep them unwrinkled. And a bottle with a rubber bulb and a sprayer-thing on it. This last J. Hector squeezed in Myron's direction, and Myron was conscious of a rarer, stranger scent than ever he had known. And these newfangled pyjamas, instead of a white night-shirt neatly edged at the neck with red binding such as Albert Dumbolton and Tom Weagle--and Myron and Ora Weagle--naturally wore. And not one or two but no less than six several neckties. And a whole box of fifty cigars, with red and gold bands. And--aside from the Old Taylor that Myron had brought up--a bottle of whisky curiously named 'John Haig'.
And even a book.
The book J. Hector tossed to Myron. 'Read much, Cap'n? Good thing to do. Broadens your mind and gives you a vocabulary, so you can get the customers dizzy and unload the orders on 'em, and even be able to make a speech at church suppers.'
Myron regarded the volume with awe. It was bound in paper, with a striking picture of a gentleman with moustache kissing a high-haired young lady in the presence of moonlight and a church tower, and it was entitled 'The Perils of Passion: or The Struggles of Sally St. Cyr: a Story of Humble Hearts and Proud Blood o' the Cumberlands'.
His unpacking done, J. Hector, brave with cigar smoke, thumbs in his arm-holes, lolled in a straight chair which seemed transformed into a velvet fauteuil. (Myron knew the word 'fauteuil' from the catalogues he had studied when they were furnishing the hotel parlour.) Myron did not ever, like the blandly intrusive Ora, assume that his presence was always wanted; but J. Hector seemed glad of his company till the poker game should begin, and Myron stood beaming, shyly dragging his foot, while J. Hector discoursed on Bridgeport, New York ('lot bigger burg than Bridgeport, but you take my word for it, boy, not half as live a town'), the wonders of the new Spurgis & Pownall kitchen range and the quixotic amount of nickle Mr. Pownall had caused to be spread upon it.
To any American village in 1895, except for the half-dozen old and wealthy families who were familiars of New York or Boston or Chicago or Europe, the travelling-man was the one missionary from the Great World, and the young people listened to him with reverence. He was the Marquis back from Paris; he was Erasmus and Casanova; he was the Phoenician galley-captain returned from Ostia; he was the radio and the Harvard graduate and the Book of Etiquette.
J. Hector gossiped of cocktails at the Waldorf bar, of planked blue-fish in Fulton Market, of champagne at Martin's, of the gigantic liners Campania and Lucania, each 13,000 tons, big as cathedrals, sailing from New York to Liverpool, and of an intimate friend of J. Hector's who had actually sailed on one of them and spent no less than eight weeks abroad, becoming authoritatively acquainted with England, Scotland, France, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Austro-Hungary, Italy, Switzerland, and Spain.