“Who lives on the top floor here?” he asked.
“Top floor?” answered the bookseller. “A Mrs. Wagner. She’s a German woman, a widow. She works in Barker’s laundry. She has three rooms upstairs, and gets them for almost nothing. Lets the front one to students and makes a pretty good thing out of it, I guess.”
“Who are the students?” Hansel asked. “Do you know their names?”
“Let me see. One of them is named Sankey or Sanger, or something like that. I don’t know his friend’s name.”
“Sanger, I guess,” said Hansel. “I know there is such a chap. They’ll have to move out, too, I suppose.”
“Yes, we’ve all got to go inside of a fortnight. For my part, I’ll be glad to get out of here.”
“You don’t happen to have heard what this Mrs. Wagner is going to do?”
“No, but I guess she’ll be able to find another place, all right. I guess she isn’t very particular.”
“Thank you,” said Hansel. He went back to the street and meditated. Then he passed in at the entrance to the upper stories and mounted the stairs. The first flight was well lighted, but when he came to the second he had to grope his way up, for the place was as dark as Egypt. From the upper corridor four doors opened, one of them, as was evident, to a closet filled with trash, and the others to the three rooms. The only light came from a small and very dusty skylight let into a leaky roof. Hansel went to the door of the room on the front of the building and knocked. There was no answer. As he had presumed, the occupants were at school. On the door were tacked two cards bearing their names. What with the poor writing and the lack of light, it was all Hansel could do to decipher them. But he succeeded at last, and learned that the names of the occupants were John Wild Sanger and Evan Fairman Shill. He had learned all that it was possible to learn at present, and so he made his way cautiously down the stairs and hurried back to the academy.
After football practice that afternoon Hansel walked back to the campus with Harry Folsom. There had been something of a slump in the team, and Harry was looking rather gloomy for him; it took a good deal to ruffle his cheerfulness. After they had discussed the cause of the slump, and had attributed it to a variety of things, and Hansel had predicted a return to form the next day, the latter brought the conversation around to the subject upon which his thoughts had been engaged ever since the forenoon.