“You don’t?” asked Bob, and then he elaborately yawned and stretched, as though wearied with his night of pleasure, and as though what he was hearing didn’t at all matter to him. But it did—very much.
“No, I don’t!” declared Mike Brennan.
“Well, that isn’t going to make me lose any more sleep,” declared Bob, again yawning. “I just came to tell him something, but if he’s gone some other time will do.” He gave the impression of elaborate indifference, so much so as even to deceive Mr. Brennan.
“There won’t be any other time,” declared the proprietor. “This fellow—Rodney or Pietro or whatever his name is has gone for good.”
“Good riddance, I say,” exclaimed Bob, though he didn’t really mean it. “He wasn’t any credit to the town, playing that wheezy music and digging holes in a bramble patch to plant monkey nuts—crazy stuff I call it. But what makes you think he wasn’t an Italian, Mr. Brennan? He looked like one and talked like one, and nobody but a dago would go around with a hand organ and a monkey.”
“I don’t know about that, but when this man with the iron hook called the other ‘Rodney,’ your hand organ man turned around and in as good United States’ talk as I ever heard he said: ‘Shut up, you big chump. Do you want to spill the beans?’ And that’s no kind of talk for an Italian who pretends he can’t use English.”
“No, maybe not,” laughed Bob, though within he was far from laughing. He saw big events just ahead of him—he saw a glimmering of daylight where there had been darkness, in the queer mystery of Storm Mountain. “Well, was that all?”
“Yes, except that they went off together in a sort of huff, mainly, I think, because this man with the hook called this Pietro by a name he hasn’t been using.”
“Oh, that man with the hook was a quarrelsome sort of chap,” observed Bob, easily, “he had a perpetual grouch on, I’d say. It isn’t going to worry me. I’m glad my party’s over, or those two might have called and tried to break it up,” he finished with a laugh.
“His remark could not have been better calculated to draw a reply from Mike Brennan—a reply that gave Bob just the information he wanted but for which he hesitated to ask. For the hotel man said: