cure the custom of the dead.

"Get to know people really well while they are alive," said Mr. Gingham;
"be friends with them, close friends and then when they die you don't
need to worry. You'll get the order every time."

So, naturally, as the moment was one of sympathy, it was Mr. Gingham who
spoke first.

"What'll you do, Josh," he said, "if the Commissioners go against you?"

"Boys," said Mr. Smith, "I don't rightly know. If I have to quit, the
next move is to the city. But I don't reckon that I will have to quit.
I've got an idee that I think's good every time."

"Could you run a hotel in the city?" asked Mullins.

"I could," said Mr. Smith. "I'll tell you. There's big things doin'
in the hotel business right now, big chances if you go into it right.
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.

After that, he had taken a food contract for a gang of railroad navvies
on the transcontinental.

After that, of course, the whole world was open