“Here he comes now,” replied the youth, looking up and examining Clyde with keen, gray eyes.
Clyde gazed in the direction indicated, and saw approaching a brisk and dapper and decidedly sophisticated-looking person of perhaps twenty-nine or thirty years of age. He was so very slender, keen, hatchet-faced and well-dressed that Clyde was not only impressed but overawed at once—a very shrewd and cunning-looking person. His nose was so long and thin, his eyes so sharp, his lips thin, and chin pointed.
“Did you see that tall, gray-haired man with the Scotch plaid shawl who went through here just now?” he paused to say to his assistant at the desk. The assistant nodded. “Well, they tell me that's the Earl of Landreil. He just came in this morning with fourteen trunks and four servants. Can you beat it! He's somebody in Scotland. That isn't the name he travels under, though, I hear. He's registered as Mr. Blunt. Can you beat that English stuff? They can certainly lay on the class, eh?”
“You said it!” replied his assistant deferentially.
He turned for the first time, glimpsing Clyde, but paying no attention to him. His assistant came to Clyde's aid.
“That young fella there is waiting to see you,” he explained.
“You want to see me?” queried the captain of the bell-hops, turning to Clyde, and observing his none-too-good clothes, at the same time making a comprehensive study of him.
“The gentleman in the drug store,” began Clyde, who did not quite like the looks of the man before him, but was determined to present himself as agreeably as possible, “was saying—that is, he said that I might ask you if there was any chance here for me as a bell-boy. I'm working now at Klinkle's drug-store at 7th and Brooklyn, as a helper, but I'd like to get out of that and he said you might—that is—he thought you had a place open now.” Clyde was so flustered and disturbed by the cool, examining eyes of the man before him that he could scarcely get his breath properly, and swallowed hard.
For the first time in his life, it occurred to him that if he wanted to get on he ought to insinuate himself into the good graces of people—do or say something that would make them like him. So now he contrived an eager, ingratiating smile, which he bestowed on Mr. Squires, and added: “If you'd like to give me a chance, I'd try very hard and I'd be very willing.”
The man before him merely looked at him coldly, but being the soul of craft and self-acquisitiveness in a petty way, and rather liking anybody who had the skill and the will to be
