"We can't keep open much longer if things don't improve." The moment the words were out Tom regretted them. He didn't know how he had come to speak them. He hadn't meant to give this fact away. Certainly there had been nothing particularly sympathetic in the tone of Perkins's choppy questions. But the other man's next words knocked his regrets out of his mind in a jiffy.
"Could you entertain a dozen men at supper to-morrow night if they came in a bunch without warning?"
"Give us the chance!"
"Chance might happen—better be prepared. I expect to be away over to-morrow night myself, but have the tip that a crowd may be coming out to sample the place. It may be a mistake—don't know."
"We'll be ready. Would they come by train?"
"Don't ask me—none of my picnic. Merely overheard the thing suggested." And Perkins, rising, cast away the close-smoked stub of his cigar. "Good-night," said he, carelessly enough, and strolled in through the wide hall of the old stone house. Tom looked after him as he mounted the stairs. The young innkeeper's spirits had gone up with a bound. A dozen men to supper! Well—he thought they could entertain them. He would go and tell his mother and Bertha on the instant; the prospect would cheer them immensely. He wondered how or where Perkins had overheard this rumour. At the post-office, most likely. It was a gossipy place, the centre of the tiny burg at the foot of the mountain, an eighth of a mile away, where a dozen small shops and half a hundred houses strung along the one small street, at the end of which the two daily trains made their half-minute stops.
The dozen men had come and gone. There were fourteen of them, to be exact, and they had climbed out of a couple of big touring cars with sounds of hilarity which made the elderly ladies jump in their chairs. They had swarmed over the place as if they owned it, had talked and laughed and joked and shouted, all in a perfectly agreeable way which woke up Boswell's as if it were in the centre of somewhere instead of off in the mountains. They had scrawled fourteen vigorous scrawls upon the register and made it necessary to turn the page, this of itself affording the clerk a satisfaction quite out of proportion to the apparent unimportance of the incident. Then they had gone gayly in to supper, had sat about two stainless tables close by the open windows, and had been waited upon by both Sue and Tim in such alert fashion that their plates arrived almost before they had unfurled their napkins.
Out in the kitchen, crimson-cheeked and solicitous, Mrs. Boswell had sent in relays of broiled chicken, young and tender, browned as only artists of her rank can brown them, flanked by potatoes cooked in a way known only to herself. These were two of her "specialties," which the elderly ladies were accustomed to enjoy without mentioning it. Pickles and jellies such as the fourteen men had tasted only in childhood accompanied these dishes, and the little hot rolls came on in piles which melted away before the delighted attacks of the hungry guests; so that the kitchen itself became alarmed, and cut the elderly ladies a trifle short, at which complaints were promptly filed, though it was the first time such a shortage had occurred.
Other toothsome dishes followed and were partaken of with such zest and so many frank expressions of approval that Sue and Tim carried to the kitchen reports which forced their mother to ask them to stop, lest she lose her head. When the amber coffee with a fine cheese and crisp toasted wafers ended the meal, the guests were in such a state of satisfaction that Tom, though he did not know it, had acquired with them his first "pull."