In reply he pencilled on a slip as though we were deaf, and finally laid the completed bill face down beside my plate. I turned it over and grew pale.
It totalled one dollar and twenty cents!
I felt weak and cold as if I had been suddenly poisoned. I trembled, then grew hot with indignation. "Sixty cents apiece!" I gasped. "Didn't I warn you?"
Frank was still in reckless mood. "Well, this is the only time we have to do it. They won't catch us here again."
I paid the bill and hurried out, bitterly exclaiming, "No more New York for me. I will not stay in such a robbers' den another night."
And I didn't. At sunset we crossed the ferry and took the train for New Brunswick, New Jersey. Why we selected this town I cannot say, but I think it must have been because it was half-way to Philadelphia—and that we were just about as scared of Philadelphia as we were resentful of New York.
After a night battle with New Jersey mosquitoes and certain plantigrade bed-fellows native to cheap hotels, we passed on to Philadelphia and to Baltimore, and at sunset of the same day reached Washington, the storied capital of the nation.
Everything we saw here was deeply significant, national, rousing our patriotism. We were at once and profoundly interested by the negro life which flowered here in the free air of the District as under an African sun; the newsboys, the bootblacks, the muledrivers, all amused us. We spent that first night in Washington in a little lodging house just at the corner of the Capitol grounds where beds were offered for twenty-five cents. It was a dreadful place, but we slept without waking. It took a large odor, a sharp lance to keep either of us awake in those days.
Tramping busily all the next day, we climbed everything that could be climbed. We visited the Capitol, the war building, the Treasury and the White House grounds. We toiled through all the museums, working harder than we had ever worked upon the farm, till Frank cried out for mercy. I was inexorable. "Our money is getting low. We must be very saving of carfare," I insisted. "We must see all we can. We'll never be here again."
Once more we slept (among the negroes in a bare little lodging house), and on the third day, brimming with impressions, boarded the Chicago express and began our glorious, our exultant return over the Alleghanies, toward the west.