“Well, but—why, Colonel, it’s six stories high. I don’t quite make out which window you—”
“All the windows, all of them. Let him have his choice—I’m indifferent, now that I have located him. You go and stand on the corner and wait; I’ll prospect the hotel.”
The earl drifted here and there through the swarming lobby, and finally took a waiting position in the neighborhood of the elevator. During an hour crowds went up and crowds came down; and all complete as to limbs; but at last the watcher got a glimpse of a figure that was satisfactory—got a glimpse of the back of it, though he had missed his chance at the face through waning alertness. The glimpse revealed a cowboy hat, and below it a plaided sack of rather loud pattern, and an empty sleeve pinned up to the shoulder. Then the elevator snatched the vision aloft and the watcher fled away in joyful excitement, and rejoined the fellow-conspirator.
“We’ve got him, Major—got him sure! I’ve seen him—seen him good; and I don’t care where or when that man approaches me backwards, I’ll recognize him every time. We’re all right. Now for the requisition.”
They got it, after the delays usual in such cases. By half past eleven they were at home and happy, and went to bed full of dreams of the morrow’s great promise.
Among the elevator load which had the suspect for fellow-passenger was a young kinsman of Mulberry Sellers, but Mulberry was not aware of it and didn’t see him. It was Viscount Berkeley.
CHAPTER VII.
Arrived in his room Lord Berkeley made preparations for that first and last and all-the-time duty of the visiting Englishman—the jotting down in his diary of his “impressions” to date. His preparations consisted in ransacking his “box” for a pen. There was a plenty of steel pens on his table with the ink bottle, but he was English. The English people manufacture steel pens for nineteen-twentieths of the globe, but they never use any themselves. They use exclusively the pre-historic quill. My lord not only found a quill pen, but the best one he had seen in several years—and after writing diligently for some time, closed with the following entry:
BUT IN ONE THING I HAVE MADE AN IMMENSE MISTAKE, I OUGHT TO HAVE SHUCKED MY TITLE AND CHANGED MY NAME BEFORE I STARTED.