“No complaint after all, Rogers,” said he to the night clerk, rather jauntily. “My friend confessed that he hadn't called me up at all. It was his nice little way of stringing me. Assuage the poor girl's grief if you know how, Rogers. Tell her it's all right, and she can sleep soundly at the switch. Also, be good enough to say to her that I apologize for myself and for my friend.”
Rogers watched him enter the elevator, and once more strolled back to the switchboard.
“Hey! Wake up. Zimmerlein's just come in. He's stewed and says his friend's a liar. There won't be any court-martial.”
The girl yawned. “Say, has that darned old clock stopped, or is it still only ten minutes of two? It's been that for an hour. Never again for me. Next time Pilcher wants to get off till half-past 'leven, he needn't leave a call for me. I'm through accommodating that mutt. My Gawd! Two o'clock, and he swore he'd be here by eleven. I ought to report him. Do a guy like that a favour and he—What was that you said about old Zim-zim? D'you say he was soused?”
“No. I said stewed. He's carryin' an egg on an oyster fork. I never saw him drunk before.”
At his usual hour for breakfasting, Mr. Zimmerlein briskly entered the dining-room the next morning and seated himself at his customary table near the window. Two morning newspapers lay beside his plate of sliced oranges. His eyes swept the headlines on the front page. A slight frown darkened his brow. He looked again, a little more closely. Then he took up the other paper. A certain eagerness that had been in his eyes when he sat down gave way to something bordering on astonishment. His interest passed quickly to the second, third and fourth pages.
There wasn't a line,—not a solitary line about the sinking of the Elston!
He had encountered Elberon late in the afternoon of the preceding day. He was going into the club as the other came out.
“You will read something great in the morning papers,” Elberson had said guardedly. “Perhaps in the extras tonight.”
“I am always reading something great in the newspapers,” he had replied.