Then wearily, and as one mindful that a hotel man is ever the servant
of the public, he turned back into the hotel.

"Billy," he said to the desk clerk, "if a wire comes bring it into
the bar parlour."

The voice of Mr. Smith is of a deep guttural such as Plancon or
Edouard de Reske might have obtained had they had the advantages of
the hotel business. And with that, Mr. Smith, as was his custom in
off moments, joined his guests in the back room. His appearance, to
the untrained eye, was merely that of an extremely stout hotelkeeper
walking from the rotunda to the back bar. In reality, Mr. Smith was
on the eve of one of the most brilliant and daring strokes ever
effected in the history of licensed liquor. When I say that it was
out of the agitation of this situation that Smith's Ladies' and
Gent's Cafe originated, anybody who knows Mariposa will understand
the magnitude of the moment.

Mr. Smith, then, moved slowly from the doorway of the hotel through
the "rotunda," or more simply the front room with the desk and the
cigar case in it, and so to the bar and thence to the little room or
back bar behind it. In this room, as I have said, the brightest minds
of Mariposa might commonly be found in the quieter part of a summer
afternoon.

To-day there was a group of four who looked up as Mr. Smith entered,
somewhat sympathetically, and evidently aware of the perplexities of
the moment.