“Yes, but they hain’t enough.”
“Then,” says Mark, “you ought to make the hotel raise your pay and not go t-t-tryin’ to gouge it out of folks that stays here.”
“Everybody does it,” says the boy. “You can’t never git nothin’ done in a hotel if you don’t tip.”
“Do you git a tip every time you carry a satchel?”
“Yes.”
“Now you look here. I got an idee you’re tryin’ to git somethin’ out of us ’cause we’re kids and come from Wicksville. I’m g-g-goin’ to f-find out. If it’s the custom, why, I’ll give you a tip ’cause I want to do what’s right. But if you’re t-tryin’ to do us out of money, why, you won’t git it. I’m goin’ to ask the man behind the counter.”
And that’s what he done. He went right down and asked, and the man laughed like all-git-out and told Mark all about tips, and Mark told him what he thought about them, and then he give the boy a dime and we went to bed.
We went to sleep in a minute and it seemed like it wasn’t more than a minute before we was awake again. Mark woke up first and gouged me in the ribs till I woke up. Then we dressed.
“It’s f-five o’clock,” says Mark. “We want to git our breakfast and hustle. You kin bet a man with a big job on a r-r-railroad is down to work early. He’d have to be. Maybe we kin s-see the man we want about six o’clock and git an early train home.”
So we went to a serve-self place where you didn’t eat off of a table, but off of the arm of your chair, and we et quite a good deal and it was good. Then we came back to the railroad station and it was just six o’clock. There wasn’t many folks around, but we found a man in a uniform and Mark asked him who was boss of all the freight-cars. The man told him he guessed the general freight agent was, and Mark says, “Where’s his office?”