"I'm afraid it seems longer ago to you than to me. Would you mind if I should smoke a cigar with you? I'd like to ask you some things about the old building."
"Please do," said I. "And let me introduce my roommate, Ralph Hughes."
Ralph shook hands with Mr. Curtis, and we all sat down around the fireplace. It seemed rather inhospitable not to be able to offer him any refreshments, but there was only one bottle of beer in the papier-maché fire pail in my bedroom, and it was warm at that. Hence we accepted our guest's cigars with some diffidence and awaited his first interrogation. I could see that Ralph was brimming over with eagerness to ask about "Uncle Ned" and a hundred other things which that romantic ostrich of a boy had invented during the afternoon, and I felt quite sure that before Mr. Curtis got away he would be obliged to pay heavily for the temerity of his visit by being offered up upon the altar as a sacrifice to Ralph's bump of acquisitiveness.
"Yes," said Mr. Curtis, "this was my room for four years. If you look over on the windowpane I think you'll find my name scratched on the glass in the lower left-hand corner. I wonder if that old picture of the Belvoir Fox Hunt, that I left, is still here?"
"Oh, was that yours?" exclaimed Ralph. He darted into the bedroom and unhooked a framed lithograph which had been the joy and pride of the occupants of the room for the past four decades. Mr. Curtis turned it round and pointed to his name in faded ink upon the back at the head of a long line of indorsements, each of which represented a temporary possessor.
"The old room seems about the same. The wall-paper has been changed, but that big crack over by the bedroom I remember well. And there ought to be a bullet hole in the frame of the door."
"A bullet hole!" exclaimed Ralph and I in unison.
"Yes," said Mr. Curtis quietly, "a bullet hole—a thirty-two caliber, I should judge."
Ralph seized the lamp and, holding it high above his head, carefully scrutinized the woodwork of the door.
"There it is!" he cried eagerly. "Right in the middle; and, by George, there's the bullet, too! There's a story about that, I bet—isn't there? Who fired it? How did it get there?"