"What the deuce!" he heard the next morning from a voice not unpleasant, although markedly Western. And he opened his eyes to see bending over him a ruffled, untidy, pasty-looking individual whom he remembered to have last seen sprawling on the floor.
"Say, are you in my bed or am I only out of my own?" asked the young man.
Antony told him.
"George!" exclaimed the other, sitting down on the bed and taking his head in his hands, "I was screwed all right, and I fell like a barrel in the Falls of Niagara. I'm ever so much obliged to you for not kicking up a row here. My room is next or opposite or somewhere, I guess—that is, if I'm in the Universe."
Antony said that he was.
"I feel," said the young man, "as though its revolutions had accelerated."
"There's water over there," said Antony; "you're welcome to have it."
"See here," said the total stranger, "if you're half the brick you seem—and you are or you wouldn't have let me snore all night on the carpet—ring for Alphonse and send him out to get some bromo seltzer. There's a chemist's bang up against the hotel, and he's got that line of drugs."
Fairfax put out his arm and rang from the bed. The young man waited dejectedly; having taken off his coat and collar, he looked somewhat mournfully at his silk hat which, the worse for his usage of it, had rolled in a corner of Fairfax's room.