He did not know it—not then. He only knew that they were very cordial with him, asking him a good many interested questions, and that one requested to be shown rooms, remarking that his wife and children might like to run out for a little while before the summer was over. Most of them looked back at the Inn as the automobiles bore them away, and one waved his cigar genially at Tom standing on the top step.
He was standing on the top step again the next morning when Mr. Perkins returned. Tom was wishing Perkins had been there the night before, to see confirmed the truth of the rumour he had reported.
"Well, we had the crowd here last night," was Tom's greeting, as Perkins's sharp black eyes looked up at him from the bottom step.
"So I see." Perkins held up a morning paper. The inevitable cigar was in his mouth. His face indicated no particular interest. He went along into the house as Tom grasped the paper. So he saw! What did Perkins mean by that? It couldn't be that any of that party of men had, unsolicited, taken the trouble to——
But they had, or one of them had. In a fairly conspicuous position on one of the local pages of the best city daily was an item of at least a dozen lines setting forth the fact that a party of prominent men, including several newspaper men, had taken supper the night before at Boswell's Inn, Mount o' Pines, and had found that place decidedly attractive. The paragraph stated that such a supper was seldom found at summer hotels, added that the air and the view were worth a long trip to obtain when the city was sweltering with heat, and ended by speaking of the prime condition of the roads leading to the Inn. Altogether, it was such an item as Tom had often longed to see, and the reading of it went to his head. When, ten minutes later, Tim, coming up from the post-office with the mail and another of the morning papers, excitedly called Tom's attention to a second paragraph headed, "Have You Had a Supper at Boswell's Inn?" Tom became positively delirious.
"It pays to set it up to a bunch like that," was Perkins's comment when Tom showed him this second free advertisement.
"But I didn't treat them. They paid their bills," cried the young host.
"Charge your usual price?"
"Sure. We didn't have anything extra—except the cheese. Tim drove ten miles for that."
"Usual price was all the treat those fellows needed."