"Will you be good enough to send my card to Mr. Starrett, the owner of this hotel? He knows who I am and who my father is; but if he should have forgotten, say that he is to call up Major Wilkinson, of Pierce, Wilkinson & Company, the bankers, or Mr. Blandy, of the Moontucket National Bank, or anybody who knows where New York is on the map. Good heavens! there must be somebody in Boston who hasn't been asleep for the last twenty years!" The clerk decided to be polite. The name Merriwether had a familiar sound, but he could not associate it. He said, more politely:
"I am sorry, Mr. Merriwether, but the room you want--and three others with it--have been engaged."
"You are asking me to break one of our rules."
"Well, can you tell me whether it has been engaged since yesterday?"
"Oh, longer than that!" He disappeared, consulted a book, and came back with the triumphant expression human beings put on when they do not wish to say "I told you so," aloud, "Engaged and paid for since the eighth, Mr. Merriwether. That's nine days ago. So, you see, we can't do what you ask us to. Sorry!"
Wherever he went, Tom thought he was confronted by crude attempts at mystery. To send him to this particular room, 77 on the seventh floor, was merely the same as an effort to impress children by using the magical number seven.
Who had engaged the room? Was it an accomplice or some stranger guiltless of participation in the rather juvenile joke?
Still, Tom was in Boston to do a particular thing; and, though much of the spring restlessness had gone from his veins, there remained the desire to see the affair through to the end, whether the end should be a smile or a mild oath. Therefore, after a pause, Tom said to the clerk:
"Can you give me the room exactly opposite 77 on the seventh floor?"
He consulted one of the bookkeepers, from whom he must have learned whose son Tom was. And, though Boston is not New York, money is money, even in Massachusetts; and the heir to fifty or a hundred million dollars is something, whether or not he is somebody.
"Certainly," said the clerk, and handed the key to a young man called, in New York, a bell-boy. The young man now preceded Tom to the seventh floor and ushered the New-Yorker into Room 78.