However, though the Mansion House may once have had such a distinction as being a place (one of several thousand) where George Washington stayed overnight, now were its glories departed, and it was but an ordinary hotel. Some old residents, who had given up their homes, lived there the year around. It was the stopping place of such traveling men, or drummers, who occasionally came to the place, and the annual “assembly ball” was held there.
Being an old-fashioned hotel it had many connecting and adjoining rooms, with doors between, and transoms of glass over the said doors. It was a “family” hotel, to use the expression Mr. Beel often applied to his place.
Consequently it wasn’t difficult for Bob Dexter to secure a place of observation near the room where Jolly Bill Hickey had elected to stay for a time.
“I don’t know how long I’ll be here,” Bill had said to Mr. Beel, when Bob drove him to the place the morning of the discovery of the crime on Storm Mountain.
“Stay as long as you like—we’ll try and make you welcome!” Mr. Beel had said with the bluff heartiness that characterized him when greeting a new guest.
“And you’re sure no one will object to my wooden leg?” asked Jolly Bill.
“Huh! I’d like to see ’em!” snapped out the proprietor. “You got just as good a right to have a wooden leg as another man has to have two of flesh and blood, I reckon.”
“Thanks. I’ll do my best not to make any trouble.”
So had Jolly Bill taken up his residence, and his reference to having a “few shots left in the locker” to pay his way was amply borne out, for he met his weekly bills with great regularity.
“There’s a little cubbyhole of a room next to his,” Mr. Beel had said when Bob broached his new tactics. “It used to be used to store drummers’ trunks in, when Cliffside did a bigger business than it does now. You can get in there and look over the transom if you like.”