Meanwhile Mrs. Typ would be examining the curtains and things, and giving the pirates a piece of her mind for charging Four Dollars a day for one double room and bath when they should have had the whole floor for that price.
Typ got chronic indigestion from scrapping over the price of his dejeuner, and Mrs. Typ swore regularly every morning that she’d see the buccaneers in the sixteenth sub-basement of Gehenna before she’d pay 18 cents for two measley boiled eggs—then she’d go ahead and order them.
Their daily sight-seeing and shopping excursions in all foreign countries were continually marred by the petty pilferings and short-change manoeuvering of foreign highbinders, and many a night as they sat fingering their finances in the hotel lobby and adding up how much they had squandered during the day, they would discover where they had been bilked of anywhere from seventy-five cents to one dollarr and a quarterrrrrr besides finding among their small change a worthless Portuguese coin that some low-down dragoman had handed them instead of a piastre.
When Typ and Mrs. Typ returned to America at the end of the year fagged to a frazzle and pining for just one peep at the Land of the Free and the home of the Oil Trust, their joy knew no anchor. They could hardly wait for their ship to bring them in sight of the Lady of Liberty and they pedaled the deck like jailed jaguars and Typ smoked cigar after cigar and spit over the deck-rail in wild abandon.
At last they arrived at New York and were so anxious to set feet on terry firmy that their eagerness carried them down the gang-plank before the Veterinary had come Aboard, and so they ran up against a Minion of the Law who gave them a call that reverberated for miles along the Palisades and made the Goddess of Liberty almost spill her torch. Whereupon they both got crimson back of their large ears and apologized profusely and stepped all over each other getting back into line where they crouched for seven hours without moving a muscle of the map.
Before the day was wholly gone, they were permitted to go into the Customs House, and the Inspector told them to open all baggage, and they said Yessir and got busy with the keys, and for the next hour-and-a-half were bowing and bending over 18 boxes and bags, and pulling things apart and trying their very doggondest to prove that they were on the level.
When they had at last begun to feel that they had proved their innocence, the Inspector, with his arm dug shoulder-deep in the last of the trunks, fished up a pill-box and all bets were off again until he had opened it and shaken the pills out and run his finger-nail around the crevices and turned it upside down and inside out, and put it to his ear and smelled it and trained an X-Ray machine on it, and then declared everything was all right and they could depart in peace.
Thanking the Inspector for his interest, and with a sigh of relief that was full of humility and unshed tears, they got a couple of porters to wheel their stuff out to a Taxi, and in the fullness of a swift joy that came upon them when they got outside and sniffed the free American winter air, they gave the two portering gentlemen a crisp dollar bill for the service.
Whereupon the gentlemen looked at the bill like it was some kind of curiosity, then looked at each other and groaned, and then gave the givers a look that scared them to a pope’s purple and made them finger further with the purse-string until the gentlemen had grunted their approval and departed.
When they arrived at their hotel they found they had only a couple of hundred dollars to pay the taxi fare with, but they managed to get by with it without inciting any murderous thought in the breast of the driver, and went in and registered.