“Did you f-f-fetch a little boy with you?”
“Not,” says the man. “Before I came he arrived.”
Mark shrugged his shoulders. “I guess we better humor him,” he says to me, but loud enough so the man could hear. “He’s one of them lunies, I calc’late. Talks c-c-crazy, don’t he? What’s he mean, anyhow?”
“Honorable fat boy is mistakenly in error,” says the Japanese. “There is no craziness. Altogether vice versa on the opposite. I am very much unusually bright in mind. I shall show you I have an education. I know to speak many languages.”
“Speak all of ’em as well as you s-s-speak English?”
“Yes, yes. Some as good and all better.”
“The feller that taught you,” says I, “must have known a joke when he saw it. Did he laugh much?”
He didn’t pay any attention to me, but says to Mark: “What room is Japanese boy? Up-stairs?”
“He’s got Japanese boy on the b-brain,” says Mark to me. Then he turned to the man and says: “Say, mister, was you foolin’ around here the other night? S-somebody got into the hotel and fell d-down-stairs, and screeched around and raised an awful row. Was it you?”
“Ho! No, it was not myself.” He laughed and showed two rows of the whitest teeth you ever saw. “It was ignorant fellow without schooling, who believe ghosts and spirits walks up and down. He was so frightened he has not yet stopped the shivering and shaking. You play trick on him? Eh?”