With somewhat weakly anger he said to the first clerk he reached:

"Looky here! I registered here last night, and another young feller was here said the two rooms would be twelve dollars."

"Yes, sir."

"Well, they sent me up to roost on a cloud, but I didn't kick. Now they're tryin' to charge me for meals extry. Don't that twelve dollars include meals?"

"Oh no, sir. The hotel is on the European plan."

Adna took the shock bravely but bitterly: "Well, all I got to say is the Europeans got mighty poor plans. I kind of suspicioned there was a ketch in it somewheres. After this we'll eat outside, and at the end of the week we'll take our custom somewheres else. Maybe there was a joke in that twelve dollars a week for the rooms, too."

"Twelve dollars a week! Oh no, sir; the charge is by the day."

Adna's knees seemed to turn to sand and run down into his shoes. He supported himself on his elbows.

"Twelve dollars a day--for those two rooms on the top of the moon?"

"Yes, sir; that's the rate, sir."

Adna was going rapidly. He chattered, "Ain't there no police in this town at tall?"

"Yes, sir."

"Well, I've heard they're the wust robbers of all. We'll see about this." He went back to his women folk and mumbled, "Come on up-stairs."

They followed, Mrs. Thropp murmuring to Kedzie: "Looks like poppa was goin' to be sick. I'm afraid he et too much of that rich food."

The elevator flashed them to their empyrean floor. Adna did not speak till they were in their room and he had lowered himself feebly into a chair. He spoke thickly:

"Do you know what that Judas Iscariot down there is doin' to us?

Chargin' us twelve dollars a day for these two cubby-holes--a day!

Twelve dollars a day! Eighty-four dollars a week! And that breakfast was 'levum dollars and seventy-five cents! If I'd gave the waiter the quarter I was goin' to, it would have made an even dozen dollars! for breakfast! I don't suppose anybody would ever dast order a dinner here.

Why, they'd skin a millionaire and pick his bones in a week. We'd better get out before they slap a mortgage on my house."

"Well, I just wouldn't pay it," said Mrs. Thropp. "I'd see the police about such goings-on."

"The police!" groaned Thropp. "They're in cahoots with the burglars here. This hull town is a den of thieves. I've always heard it, and now I know it."

He was ashamed of himself for being taken in so. He began to throw into the valises the duds that had been removed.

Throughout the panic Kedzie had stood about in a kind of stupor. When her father tapped her on the shoulder and repeated his "C'm'on!" she turned to him eyes all tears glistening like bubbles, and she whimpered:

"Oh, daddy, the view! The nice things!"

Adna snapped: "View? Our next view will be the poorhouse if we don't hustle our stumps. We got to get out of here and find the cheapest place they is in town to live or go back home on the next train."

Kedzie began to cry, to cry as she had cried when she wept in her cradle because candy had been taken from her, or a box of carpet-tacks, or the scissors that she had somehow got hold of.

Adna dropped his valises with a thud. He began to upbraid her. He had endured too much. He had still his bill to pay. He told her that she was a good-for-nothin' nuisance and he wished he had left her home.

He'd never take her anywheres again, you bet. Kedzie lost her reason entirely. She was shattered with spasms of grief aggravated by her mother's ferocity and her father's. She could not give up this splendor.

She would not go to a cheap place to live. She would never go back home.

She would rather die.

Her mother boxed her ears and shook her and scolded with all her vim.

But Kedzie only shook out more sobs till they wondered what the people next door would think. Adna was wan with wrath. Kedzie was afraid of her father's look. She had a kind of lockjaw of grief such as children suffer and suffer for.

All she would answer to her father's threats was: "I won't! I won't! I tell you I won't!"

Her cheeks were blubbered, her nose red, her mouth swollen, her hair wet and stringy. She gulped and swallowed and beat her hands together and stamped her feet.

Adna glared at her in hatred equal to her own for him. He said to his wife: "Ma, we got to go back to first principles with that girl. You got to give her a good beatin'."

Mrs. Thropp had the will but not the power. She was palsied with rage.

"I can't," she faltered.

"Then I will!" said Adna, and he roared with ferocity, "Come here to me, you!"

He put out his hand like a claw, and Kedzie retreated from him. She stopped sobbing. She had never been so frightened. She felt a new kind of fright, the fright of a nun at seeing an altar threatened with desecration. She had not been whipped for years. She had grown past that. Surely her body was sacred from such infamy now.

"Come here to me, I tell you!" Adna snarled, as he pursued her slowly around the chairs.

"You better not whip me, poppa," Kedzie mumbled. "You better not touch me, I tell you. You'll be sorry if you do! You better not!"

"Come here to me!" said Adna.

"Momma, momma, don't let him!" Kedzie whispered as she ran to her mother and flung herself in her arms for refuge.

Mrs. Thropp then lost a great opportunity forever. She tore the girl's hands away and handed her over to her father. And he, with ugly fury and ugly gesture, seized the young woman who had been his child and dragged her to him and sank into a chair and wrenched and twisted her arms till he held her p.r.o.ne across his knees. Then he spanked her with the flat of his hand.

Kedzie made one little outcry; then there was no sound but the thump of the blows. Adna sickened soon of his task, and Kedzie's silence and non-resistance robbed him of excuse. He growled:

"I guess that'll learn you who's boss round here."

He thrust her from his knees, and she rolled off to the floor and lay still. She had not really swooned, but her soul had felt the need of withdrawing into itself to ponder this awful sacrilege.

CHAPTER VIII

Her mother knew that she had not fainted. She was sick, too, and blamed Kedzie for the scene. She spurned the girl with her foot and said:

"You get right up off that floor this minute. Do you hear?"

Kedzie's soul came back. It had made its decision. It gathered her body together and lifted it up to its knees and then erect, while the lips said, "All right, momma."

She groped her way into the bathroom and washed her face, and straightened her hair and came forth, a dazed and pallid thing. She took up the valise her father gave her and followed her mother out, pausing to pa.s.s her eyes about the beautiful room and the window where the peaks of splendor were. Then she walked out, and her father locked the door.

Kedzie saw that the elevator-boy saw that she had been crying, but what was one shame extra? She had no pride left now, and no father and no mother, no anybody.