Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/333

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DURING THE WAR
321

they 'd turn off that tap," the father growled at the splashing fountain. "All nonsense. Serve a dinner without running water."

"Now, Father," she laughed, "endure it for to-night. We 'll find a quieter hotel to-morrow."

He looked around for the waiter, who was behind him. They began to give their order. "And while we 're waiting for it," she said to her father, "you 'll tell Lieutenant Price about your meeting with General Morgan."

It would be difficult to say how she succeeded in giving the lieutenant to understand—by the mere turn of her eye—that her father's account of his meeting with General Morgan might have point in excusing his manner of meeting Lieutenant Price.

"There was nothing the matter with the way I met General Morgan," he said gruffly.

"It was the raider," she explained to Price. "General Morgan—during the war."

"Oh?" Price was interested. "Did you know him?"

"Know him? No. Knew his brother Charlton. Used to come to the Burritt House in Cincinnati when I was telegraph operator there. Huh! I 'm one of the oldest telegraphers in this country, do you know that?"

Lieutenant Price knew merely that he was the vice-president of a system of railroad and steamship lines that had to publish a folder-map of a hemisphere and two oceans to show its routes—and that he was the father