He stooped
and picked it up.
"Shall I take this with me?" he asked, and I said "By all means."
That was all.
I gave ten minutes to reflection and to the possibility of Arthur's
coming back and pleading, on his knees, to be allowed to restore that
defective larynx. Then I went straight upstairs to the telephone and
rang up the Central office. When they replied "_Hello_," I said, in the
moderate and concentrated tone which we all use through telephones, "Can
you give me New York?"
Poppa was in New York, and in an emergency poppa and I always turn to
one another. There was a delay, during which I listened attentively,
with one eye closed--I believe it is the sign of an unbalanced intellect
to shut one eye when you use the telephone, but I needn't go into
that--and presently I got New York. In a few minutes more I was
accommodated with the Fifth Avenue Hotel.
"Mr. T.P. Wick, of Chicago," I demanded.
"_Is his room number Sixty-two?_"
That is the kind of mind which you usually find attached to the New York
end of a trans-American telephone. But one does not bandy words across a
thousand miles of country with a hotel clerk, so I merely responded:
"Very probably.
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