Lonnegan looked at Mac curiously. The dear fellow must be talking through his hat.
“Now, I got a sudden shock on the steamer on my way home last fall, and from an American gentleman, too—one of the best, if he was in tarpaulins—and I didn’t get over it for a week. No kotow about him, I tell you. I wanted a newspaper the worst way, and was the first man to strike the Sandy Hook pilot as he threw his sea-drenched leg over the rail. ‘Got a morning paper?’ I asked. ‘Yes, in my bag.’ And he dumped the contents on the deck and handed me a paper. I had been away from home a year, mostly in England, and hadn’t seen anybody, from a curator in a museum to the manager of an estate, who wouldn’t take a shilling when it was offered him, and so from sheer force of habit I dropped a trade dollar into his hand. You ought to have seen his face. ‘What’s this for?’ he asked. ‘No use to me.’ And he handed it back. I wanted to go out and kick myself full of holes, I was so ashamed. And, after all, it wasn’t my fault. I learned that from you Englishmen.”
The toot-toot of an automobile cut short the discussion.
The American millionaire had arrived!
Everybody now started on the run: landlord, two maids in blue dresses with white cap strings flying, three hostlers, two garage men, four dogs, all bowing and scraping—all except the dogs.
“What did I tell you?” laughed Mac, tapping the curate’s broad chest with the end of his plump finger. “That’s the way you all do. With us a porter would help him out, a hotel clerk assign him a room, and that would end it. The next morning the only man to do him reverence would be the waiter behind his chair figuring for the extra tip. Look at them. Same old kotow. No wonder he thinks himself a duke.”
The party had disembarked now and were nearing the door of the private entrance, the two women in Mother Hubbard veils, the two men in steamer-caps and goggles—the valet and maid carrying the coats and parasols. The larger of the two men shed his goggles, changed his steamer-cap for a slouch hat which his valet handed him, and disappeared inside, followed by the landlord. The smaller man, his hands and arms laden with shawls and wraps, gesticulated for an instant as if giving orders to the two chauffeurs, waited until both machines had backed away, and entered the open door.
“Who do you think the big man is, Mac?” Lonnegan asked.
“Don’t know, and don’t want to know.”
“Lambert.”