Page:Frank Stockton - Rudder Grange.djvu/198

Rh "When the conductor came along we had to pay the fare of them two lunertics, besides our own, for neither of em' [sic] had a cent about 'em. When we got to town we went to a smallish hotel, near the ferry, where Jone knowed the man who kep' it, who wouldn't bother about none of us havin' a scrap of baggage, knowin' he'd get his money all the same, out of either Jone or his father. The General an' his sister looked a kind o' funny in their little straw hats an' green carpet slippers, an' the clerk didn't know whether he hadn't forgot how to read writin' when the big man put down the names of General Tom Thumb and Mrs. ex-President Andrew Jackson, which he wasn't ex-President anyway, bein' dead; but Jone he whispered they was travellin' under nommys dess plummys (I told him to say that), an' he would fix it all right in the mornin'. An' then we got some supper, which it took them two lunertics a long time to eat, for they was all the time forgettin' what particular kind o' business they was about, an' then we was showed to our rooms. They had two rooms right across the hall from ours. We hadn't been inside our room five minutes before Mrs. General Jackson come a-knockin' at the door.

"'Look a-here,' she say to me, 'there's a unforeseen contingency in my room. An' it smells.'

"So I went right in, an' sure enough it did smell, for she had turned on all the gases, besides the one that was lighted.

"'What did you do that for?' says I, a-turnin' them off as fast as I could.

"'I'd like to know what they're made for,' says she, 'if they isn't to be turned on?'

"When I told Jone about this he looked real serious, an' jus' then a waiter came upstairs an'