“If those Orientals once get into Texas, they’ll be as hard to round up as jackrabbits.”
“Yes, and if we break up Ramirez’s gang, there’ll be no boats for the Orientals to cross in.”
“Just what I was thinking. Three ships ought to be enough, two in each.”
“Right. I’ll telephone the field to warm ’em up.” And Captain Murray turned to white-haired old Doctor Garfield, who like the others, had been an interested listener, and asked him for the location of his telephone. The Doctor silently threw open a door, and switched on the light in the next room, and Captain Murray sat down to the phone.
CHAPTER XXIV.
JACK SURRENDERS TO THE “ENEMY.”
Anybody strolling into the dining room of the Hamilton Hotel after the dinner hour three nights later would have seen an amusing sight. The big room was being prepared as if for another dinner, when, as everybody knew, the regular diners had all been and departed. Nevertheless, instead of waiters clearing the tables and porters mopping up, here were the employees of the fashionable caterer of the town directing the waiters in assembling the tables down the center of the room into one long table, some putting on snowy linen and setting out silver and plate and flowers, others placing banks of flowers along the walls.
Rangy old Jack Hannaford, looking vastly different and uncomfortable in black coat and white collar, peered into the room and then precipitately withdrew. In his retreat he bumped into several other old-timers, likewise bent upon viewing the metamorphosis of the dining room, and they chaffed him unmercifully.
“Look at him all duded up.”
“Wouldn’ta knowed ye, Jack.”
“Huh. That ain’t Jack Hannaford. That’s an undertaker. Where’s the corpse?”