The judge followed me, muttering his opinions in regard to the hotel methods in Royal City.
“Hush!” I warned. “Tread lightly and keep still. It’s a stroke of luck that he lets us pick our own rooms.”
Smoky, stinking kerosene-lamps lighted dimly the corridor up-stairs. Unplaned planks formed the floor, and here again were the walls of tarred paper that had enabled Royal City to grow overnight. Some of the doors that gave upon the corridor were open, and the rooms were dark and apparently untenanted. Light shone from chinks in the walls here and there, in other places, showing that guests were in their rooms.
I tiptoed cautiously along the planks with ear out at each point where light sifted from crannies. Then I grasped the judge by the arm and thrust him into a room. I lighted the tiny lamp and motioned the old man to take a seat in the single chair. I sat on the edge of the bed.
When a drunken man is on a topic that sops up all his interest, he not only iterates, he reiterates. It is hard to pry a wabbly tongue loose from the favorite topic. Intoxication seems to make the subject fresher and more entrancing with each repetition. The fuddled mind gets into a run-around, as men lost in snow or fog keep on traveling and always return to the same place. I had no means of determining how many times Dragg had been over the subject with Mr. Pratt, but that latter gentleman kept snarling out protests that the narrator did not heed. It was a story about how a stranger in a plug-hat—a shark of a lawyer—had hypnotized him, Dragg, on the train and had sucked out of him all his plans, projects, and secrets in regard to the new city of Breed and now proposed to rob said Dragg of all profits and rake-offs, and if a man could do that and get away with it what would be the use in any honest man starting out in the world and turning a trick for himself, as Dragg had proposed to do? So on and on, he gabbled.
“Say, look here, ‘Dangerflag’”—and this seemed a good nickname for Dragg’s red face—“don’t con me any more as the human charlotte russe—the top part of me is hard! There ain’t any such thing as hypnotizing a man when he doesn’t want to be hypnotized. You were drunk and you slit open your little bundle of playthings for him to look at.”
“If I wasn’t hypnotized how did he get two guns off me—and I sitting there not able to move hand or foot or wink my eyes?”
“I’d be more inclined to think you begged him to take ’em as a guarantee of friendship, and offered to kiss him in the bargain,” sneered Mr. Pratt. “I’ve seen you drunk, Dragg.”
“But I wasn’t to the give-my-shirt drunk stage that time,” insisted the other. “I was hiring him for a lawyer—driving a sharp trade with him—and then he hypnotized me and cleaned me out. And he’s over there in the other hotel—and I’m going to get to him before he puts me out of business. I’ll tell you again—”
“For the love of Jehoshaphat don’t tell me again!” protested Pratt. “I have got it by heart.”