“Yes, thass-ri’,” Walter chuckled. “Saw yuh go in. Looked at the door. Saw your name plain as writin’. The card said——”
“S-sh!” Richard silenced him so thoroughly as to frighten the boy. “Never mind what the card said. Where do you think you are?” he demanded roughly; “alone in the ocean?”
Richard put on his fiercest face. Walter had a secret: very well; it should have value. “You’re a fine pal,” Richard growled, “a devil of a fine pal.” He strode forward with an excellent assumption of ferocity. “Hang that card!” he added, merely to give verisimilitude, as Pooh-Bah would say, to an otherwise bald and innocuous situation.
That card was a mistake. He had put it up to make certain that his luggage would reach the room promptly, and with no thought of its being a permanent name-plate. When he reached his door with Walter he wrenched it off impatiently.
“Come in,” he changed his tone. “Come in, old chap. Let’s talk things over. Have something to drink.”
Richard unscrewed a flask and poured out a good-sized “slug.”
“That’s all,” he warned. “You’re in a bad way, man, and I’m not going to have you kicking completely over. I’m good for a drink now and then, but you can’t swim in it.”
Walter drank eagerly. It seemed to set him up almost instantly. Some of the fight went out of him.
“You’re all right,” he commented sagely. “A wise guy, you are. And so am I, all right.”
“Of course you are.”