And old Blue Beak had his memory with him, all right. He came back. He and the Boss had a long session of it. In the morning the Boss says to me:
"Shorty, throw out your chest; you're going to live in a castle for a while."
Then he told me how it happened. Blue Beak wasn't any con. man at all, just one of those hard-up gents whose names look well in a list of guests, but don't carry weight with the paying teller. He was in such a rush to get the ranch off his hands, though, that price didn't seem to figure much. That's what made the Boss sit up and take notice. He was a great one for wanting to know why.
"We'll start to-day," says he.
So off we goes, moseyin' down into It'ly on a bum railroad, staying at bummer hotels, and switching off to a rickety old chaise behind a pair of animated frames that showed the S. P. C. A. hadn't got as far as It'ly yet. Think of riding from the Battery to White Plains in a Fifth Avenue stage! That would be a chariot race to what we took before we hove in sight of that punky castle. After that it was like climbing three sets of Palisades, one top of the other, on a road that did the corkscrew all the way.
"That's your castle, is it?" says I, rubberin' up at it. "Looks like a storage warehouse stranded on Pike's Peak. Gee, but I wouldn't like to fall out of one of those bedroom windows! You'd never hit anything for an hour. Handy place to have company, though; wouldn't have to put on the potatoes until you saw 'em coming. So that's a castle, is it? I don't wonder old Blue Beak had a lot of conversation to unload. If I live up there all summer I shall accumulate enough talk to last me the rest of my life."
"Oh, I don't imagine we'll be lonesome," puts in the Boss. "I fancy I caught sight of one or two of our neighbors on the way."
"You did?" says I. "Where?"
"Behind the rocks," says he, kind of snickering.
But I never savvied. I'd had my eyes glued to that dago Waldorf-Astoria balanced up there on that toothpick of a mountain. I had a batty idea that the next whiff of breeze would jar it loose. But when they'd opened up a gate like the double doors of an armory, and let us in, I forgot all that. Say, that castle was the solidest thing I ever run across. The walls were so thick that the windows looked like they were set at the end of tunnels. In the middle was a big court, such as they have in these swell new apartment houses, and a lot of doors and windows opened on that.