Then he looked as if he wanted to fight somebody. He began to chew on his words.

Kedzie caught only a few phrases in the holes in the noisy music.

"When did she get back? And she's here with him? I'll kill him--"

Kedzie stood on tiptoe, primevally trying to lift her ears higher still to hear what followed. She saw Zada putting her hand on Peter's sleeve, and she heard Zada say:

"Don't start anything here. Remember I got a reputation to lose, if you haven't."

This had the oddest effect on Peter. He stared at Zada, and his anger ran out of his face just as the water ran out of the silver washbowl in the sleeping-car. Then he began to laugh softly, but as if he wanted to laugh right out loud. He put his napkin up and laughed into that.

And then the anger he had lost ran up into Zada's face, and she looked at Peter as if she wanted to kill him.

Now it was Peter who put his hand on her arm and patted it and said, "I didn't mean anything."

Mean what? Kedzie wondered. But she had no chance to find out, for Peter rose from the table and, dodging around the dancing couples, made his escape. He reappeared in the very nook where Kedzie watched, and called up to Zada:

"Did they see me?"

Zada shook her head. Peter threw her a kiss. She threw him a shrug of contempt. Peter went away laughing. Kedzie waited a few minutes and saw that Mr. Devoe had come to sit with Zada.

After a moment the music was resumed, and Zada rose to dance again with Mr. Devoe--a curious sort of dance, in which she lifted her feet high and placed them carefully, as if she were walking on a floor covered with eggs and didn't want to break any.

But Kedzie's eyes were filling with sand. They had gazed too long at brilliance. She dashed back to the elevator and to her room. She was exhausted, and she pulled off her clothes and let them lie where they fell. She slid her weary frame between the sheets and instantly slept.

Charity Coe danced till all hours with Jim, with Tom Duane and other men, and no one could have fancied that she had ever known or cared what horrors filled the war hospitals across the sea.

She was frantic enough to accept a luncheon engagement with Jim and his mother for the next day. She telephoned him in the morning: "Your angel of a mother will forgive me when you tell her I'm lunching down-town with my husband. The poor boy was detained at his office last night and didn't get my telegram till he got home. When he learned that I had come in and gone out again he was furious with himself and me. I hadn't left word where I was, so he couldn't come running after me. He waited at home and gave me a love of a call-down for my dissipation. It was a treat. I really think he was jealous."

Jim Dyckman did not laugh with her. He was thinking hard. He had seen Cheever at the Biltmore, and a little later Cheever vanished. Cheever must have seen Charity Coe then. And if he saw her, he saw him. Then why had he kept silent? Dyckman had a chilling intuition that Cheever was lying in ambush for him.

Again he was wrung with the impulse to tell Charity Coe the truth about her husband. Again some dubious decency withheld him.

CHAPTER VII

The word "breakfast" was magic stimulant to the Thropps. Kedzie put on her clothes, and the family went down to the elevator together.

They found their way to the Tudor Room, where a small number of men, mostly barricaded behind newspapers, ate briskly. A captain showed the Thropps to a table; three waiters pulled out their chairs and pushed them in under them. Another laid large pasteboards before them. Another planted ice-water and b.u.t.ter and salt and pepper here and there.

Adna had traveled enough to know that the way to order a meal in a hotel is to give the waiter a wise look and say, "Bring me the best you got."

This waiter looked a little surprised, but he said, "Yes, sir. Do you like fruit and eggs and rolls, maybe?"

"Nah," said Adna. "Breakfast's my best meal. Bring us suthin' hearty and plenty of it. I like a nice piece of steak and fried potatoes and some griddle-cakes and maple-surrup, and if you got any nice sawsitch--and the wife usually likes some oatmeal, and she takes tea and toast, but bring me some hot bread. And the girl--What you want, Kedzie? The same's I'm takin'? All right. Oh, some grape-fruit, eh? She wants grape-fruit.

Got any good? All right. I guess I'll take some grape-fruit, too; and let me see--I guess that'll do to start on--Wait! What's that those folks are eatin' over there? Looks good--spring chicken--humm! I guess you'd like that better'n steak, ma? Yes. She'd rather have the chicken.

All right, George, you hustle us in a nice meal and I'll make it all right with you. You understand."

Adna called all waiters "George." It saved their feelings, he had heard.

The waiter bowed and retired. Adna spoke to his family:

"Since we pay the same, anyway, might's well have the best they got."

The waiter gave the three a meal fitter for the ancient days when kings had dinner at nine in the morning than for these degenerate times when breakfast hardly lives up to its name.

The waiter and his cronies stood at a safe distance and watched the Thropps surround that banquet. They wondered where the old man got money enough to buy such breakfasts and why he didn't spend some of it on clothes.

The favorite theory was that he was a farmer on whose acres somebody had discovered oil or gold and bought him out for a million. Mr. Thropp's proper waiter hoped that he would be as extravagant with his tip as he was with his order. He feared not. His waiterly intuition told him the old man put in with more enthusiasm than he paid out.

At last the meal was over. The Thropps were groaning. They had not quite absorbed the feast, but they had wrecked it utterly. Mr. Thropp found only one omission in the perfect service. The toothpicks had to be asked for. All three Thropps wanted them.

While Thropp was fishing in his pocket for a quarter, and finding only half a dollar which he did not want to reveal, the waiter placed before him a closely written ma.n.u.script, face down, with a lead-pencil on top of it.

"What's this?" said Thropp.

"Will you please to sign your name and room number, sir?" the waiter suggested.

"Oh, I see," said Thropp, and explained to his little flock. "You see, they got to keep tabs on the regular boarders."

Then he turned the face of the bill to the light. His pencil could hardly find a place to put his name in the long catalogue. He noted a sum scrawled in red ink: "$11.75."

"Wha-what's this?" he said, faintly.

The surprised waiter explained with all suavity: "The price of the breakfast. If it is not added correctlee--"

Thropp added it with accurate, but tremulous, pencil. The total was correct, if the items were. He explained:

"But I'm a regular--er--roomer here. I pay by the week."

"Yes, sir--if you will sign, it will be all right."

"But that don't mean they're going to charge me for breakfast? 'Levum dollars and seventy-five cents for--for breakfast?--for a small family like mine is? Well, I'd like to see 'em! What do they think I am!"

The waiter maintained his courtesy, but Adna was infuriated. He put down no tip at all. He lifted his family from the table with a yank of the eyes and snapped at the waiter:

"I'll soon find out who's tryin' to stick me.--you or the proprietor."

The old man stalked out, followed by his fat ewe and their ewe lamb.

Adna's very toothpick was like a small bayonet.

His wife and daughter hung back to avoid being spattered with the gore of the unfortunate hotel clerk. The morning trains were unloading their mobs, and it was difficult to reach the desk at all.

When finally Adna got to the bar he had lost some of his running start.