Ilam’s reply was a mute surrender. He dropped his eyes, and the next moment the two underlings had the spectacle of the corpulent Mr. Ilam lifting a sixty-pound weight and struggling with it to the door, followed by the revolver and Mr. Jetsam behind the revolver.
“Stop in the doorway a second,” ordered Jetsam. He addressed the clerks again. “If I were you, I shouldn’t hurry out of here. You might catch cold.”
And then they saw Ilam disappear, the box in his arms, and Mr. Jetsam follow him. Mr. Jetsam closed the door. The clerks were alone.
“Well, of all the——!” exclaimed the younger man.
“I wonder how soon it will be safe for us to leave!” said Mr. Gloucester.
CHAPTER XXI—Interrupting a Concert
That evening the nightly concert of the “Carpentaria Band” was held in the great court of the Exposition Palace, partly because the weather was threatening, and partly because the Y.M.C.A. wished it so. The stalwart members of the Y.M.C.A. were prominent and joyous, and they pervaded the City to the number of some fifty thousand. They were nearly all young, and they were all, without exception, enthusiastic. They had taken possession of practically the whole of the tables on the three tiers of balconies that surrounded the court, and there was also a considerable sprinkling of them on the ground floor. They liked Carpentaria; they liked his music; they liked his way of conducting. They admired him when he split the drums of their ears, and they equally admired him when he wooed those organs with a hint of sound that was something less than a whisper. They violently cheered his marches, and with the same violence they cheered his serenades and his cradlesongs.
Consequently Carpentaria was content. He was more than content—he glowed with pleasure. He was the centre of the vast illuminated court, with its ornate architecture, and its wonderful roof, and its serried rows of lights. All eyes were centred on him. He swayed not only his band, but the multitude, by a single movement of the slim baton—that magic bit of ivory which he held in his hand. He said to himself that he had never had a better, a more appreciative and enthusiastic audience in the whole of his glorious career. The result was, that-he conducted in his most variegated and polychromatic manner. He did things with his wand that no conductor had ever done with a wand before; he performed gyrations, contortions, and acrobatics beyond all his previous exploits. In a word, he surpassed himself.