Mark nudged me and whispered. “Good sign. When you f-find anybody a dog’ll trust like that it’s pretty safe for p-people to trust him too.”
It sort of surprised me the way Motu talked English. I supposed Japanese and Chinese always talked sort of funny like. “Me find li’l’ dogee back topside,” or something of that sort, but Motu pronounced his words right and was that particular about his grammar that it made me sort of ashamed. So I asked him about it.
“How’d you learn to talk English so good?” I says.
“I have gone to school in England at school they call Eton. Also I am coming to school in the United States some day—maybe.”
I saw Mark looking at Motu with a queer expression like he was speculating about something and was surprised and a little excited by what he figured out.
“I’ll show you where I slept if you like,” says Motu, and we followed him into the hotel and up to the second floor. Way back at the end of the hall he took us into a bedroom and then into a closet off the bedroom. There he got down on his hands and knees and crawled through a little triangular hole where the rafters showed. We followed him. It brought us into a little round place with the walls all sloping up to a point like a clown’s hat. In the middle it was big enough to stand straight, and there was lots of room to sleep and keep things.
Mark looked around as well as he could in the dim light, for there wasn’t a window—nothing but a few little holes in the roof.
“I know where we are,” says he, satisfied with himself. “We’re in the peak of that little t-tower just over the dining-room.”
Motu nodded.
“How’d you ever f-find it?”