Not until later, until our adventure was over with and the excitement had died out of my nerves, did I fully realize how fortunate it was for the two of us that Scoop, in good presence of mind, had smashed down the hall door in advance of the soap man’s entrance into the old hotel.
For we would have been at a disadvantage, as you can see, if we had waited and the enemy had heard us smashing our way to freedom. There would have been no chance then for us to gain possible secret possession of the talking frog.
The spy had entered the hotel through the kitchen door. But we couldn’t hear him in the building. And this worried us, in a measure. For we were fearful of suddenly meeting him, face to face, in the building’s shadowy halls.
Of course, in meeting him we could have outrun him. Easy. We were in no particular danger. [[214]]But it was necessary to our plans to not let the newcomer know that we were ahead of him in the building. This was the main reason why we didn’t want to meet him.
We had descended the two flights of stairs to the ground floor and were almost to the doorway leading into the kitchen when our ears were suddenly punctured by a gurgling sneeze.
We stopped as quick as scat.
“He’s in the kitchen,” whispered Scoop.
“Maybe he’s laying for us.”
“Probably.”
“What are you going to do?”