“You know what you are?” I asked him asudden. “You’re a damned, third rate fakir and swindler! You know you’re lying when you say that room rents for three per person when three occupy it. That’s nine dollars a day for a room in an hotel that gets two or three dollars at the outside.”
He smiled, unperturbed, and then turned to wait on other people.
I raged and swore. I called him a few more names, but it never disturbed him the least. I demanded to see the mythical manager—but he remained mythical. Franklin, shocked, went off to get a cigar, and then helped Speed carry out the bags, porters being scarce. Meanwhile, I hung around hoping that glaring and offering to fight would produce some result. Not at all. Do you think I got back our three dollars, or that I ever saw the manager? Never. The car was ready. Franklin was waiting. He looked at me as much as to say, “Well, you do love to fight, don’t you?” Finally I submitted to the inevitable, and, considerably crestfallen, clambered into the car, while Franklin uttered various soothing comments about the futility of attempting to cope with scoundrels en route. What was a dollar or two, more or less? But as we rode out of Sandusky I saw myself (1) beating the hotel clerk to death, (2) tearing the hotel down and throwing it into the lake, (3) killing the manager and all the clerks and help, (4) marching a triumphant army against the city at some future time, and razing it to the last stone.
“I would show them, by George! I would fix them!”
“Aren’t the clouds fine this morning?” observed Franklin, looking up at the sky, as we rolled out of the city. “See that fine patch of woods over there. Now that we’re getting near the Indiana line the scenery is beginning to improve a little, don’t you think?”
We were in a more fertile land, I thought—smoother, more prosperous. The houses looked a little better, more rural and homey.
“Yes, I think so,” I grumbled.
“And that’s the lake off there. Isn’t the wind fresh and fine?”
It was.
In a little while he was telling me of some Quakers who inhabited a Quaker community just north of his home town, and how one of them said to another once, in a fit of anger: