"Sure!" said he.
The boy faded into the gloom of the far end of the room, leaned over, and tugged away vigorously for a few moments on a screw in the baseboard, and then standing back about two feet he began to bombard the wall with lighted matches—the kind which light only on the seat of a bellboy's trousers. I shall not attempt to say how many of these he lit and threw at the wall before anything happened. It seemed to be an appalling number, and considering the manifest inflammability of the building, and the height of my room from the ground, it made me very nervous.
"What the dickens are you doing?" said I.
But there was neither time nor need for his answer. One well projected match seemed to hit the particular bullseye he was aiming at. There came a boom and a flash, and in a second I saw a half-dozen sizable flames creeping upward from the floor to a point about breast high on the wall, where by some strange miracle the conflagration stopped.
"Nacheril gas!" said the boy, with a grin, as he departed.
It had been my intention to remain overnight in that city; but when I realized that that same process was probably going on in at least a dozen other apartments, above, beside, and below me, I suddenly decided to return to New York on the night train. I will take my chances on the future life; but while I live, breathe, and have my being upon this terrestrial orb I believe in getting fire risks down to their lowest reducible minimum by adopting a policy of complete avoidance.
Our clever newspaper humorists have made a good deal of capital out of the haughty hotel clerk with the diamond stud; but I must confess that I have never yet encountered this individual in the wide swath of my wanderings. Save in one or two places, I have found on the contrary a genial solicitude for my welfare, wholly undecorated as to shirt-front—often indeed without the shirt-front itself—which has more than offset such shortcomings as were characteristic of the inns over whose desks they presided.
On one occasion in Indianapolis I encountered what seemed at first to be a heartless lack of appreciation and cordial recognition on my arrival; but it was more than compensated for in the end, and I should add was rather the result of a too high expectation on my own part than the fault of the man behind the register. I had long wished to visit Indianapolis, largely because of its national reputation as a literary center. A State that has produced so many authors of high distinction as have come out of Indiana, with her General Lew Wallace, her James Whitcomb Riley, Charles Major, Meredith Nicholson, George Ade, Booth Tarkington, and those two purveyors of wholesome fiction and good, clean humor, the McCutcheon brothers, is entitled to some of the laureled interest of a literary Mecca, and I registered at the Claypool in my boldest hand, quietly and confidently expecting some immediate recognition, such as a not altogether unknown worker on the slopes of Parnassus might expect to receive on arriving at Olympus.
The room clerk whisked the register round and studied the inscription for a moment. "What's that—Boggs?" he inquired.
"No," said I, my crest falling a bit, "Bangs—John Ken—"