“I—now—I jist hit the glass a little wif de hammer and it did break,” confessed William. “Den I pulled on de button hook!”
“Well, you did more than that!” exclaimed his father, with a grim laugh. “You sent in the alarm when you pulled the hook. There’s no danger, my friends!” he called to the guests who were crowding out into the corridor. “There’s no fire. It was a false alarm! I shall have to punish my little boy for breaking the glass and sending in a false alarm.”
“Oh, don’t punish him!” murmured a lady, who in running from her room had caught up a canary bird in a cage and a pair of old slippers. She hardly knew what she was doing in the excitement.
“No, he didn’t mean to do it,” said a man. Trouble, by this time, knew he had done something dreadful, and was crying behind his mother’s skirts.
Luckily, the alarm Trouble caused to be sent in was only a private one, just in the hotel itself. It did not bring the Midvale fire department out, for word went to the clerk downstairs that there was no danger and he did not call out the engines or hook and ladder apparatus.
So, after all, little harm was done, except to cause some excitement and fright among the hotel guests. But this soon passed, and when the Martins went to the dining room a little later, every one looked at Trouble as a guest of some importance.
“But don’t ever do it again!” his mother warned him.
“No’m, I won’t,” he promised.
The broken glass was swept up by one of the chambermaids, and a new sheet put in front of the hook in the fire alarm box.
That evening after dinner Mr. Martin took his family to the moving picture theater near the hotel. You can imagine how surprised they were when one of the pictures proved to have been made by Mr. Portnay’s company, and he himself took a large part in it.