Hotels in the city is branching out. Why, you take the dining-room
side of it," continued Mr. Smith, looking round at the group,
"there's thousands in it. The old plan's all gone. Folks won't eat
now in an ordinary dining-room with a high ceiling and windows. You
have to get 'em down underground in a room with no windows and lots
of sawdust round and waiters that can't speak English. I seen them
places last time I was in the city. They call 'em Rats' Coolers. And
for light meals they want a Caff, a real French Caff, and for folks
that come in late another place that they call a Girl Room that don't
shut up at all. If I go to the city that's the kind of place I mean
to run. What's yours, Gol? It's on the house?"

And it was just at the moment when Mr. Smith said this that Billy,
the desk-clerk, entered the room with the telegram in his hand.

But stop--it is impossible for you to understand the anxiety with
which Mr. Smith and his associates awaited the news from the
Commissioners, without first realizing the astounding progress of Mr.
Smith in the three past years, and the pinnacle of public eminence to
which he had attained.

Mr. Smith had come down from the lumber country of the Spanish River,
where the divide is toward the Hudson Bay,--"back north" as they
called it in Mariposa.

He had been, it was said, a cook in the lumber shanties. To this day
Mr. Smith can fry an egg on both sides with a lightness of touch that
is the despair of his own "help."

After that, he had run a river driver's boarding-house.