[67]

“Please explain,” said Vail, bluffing weakly.

“Yep,” nodded Joshua Q. Mosely. “He said you’d try to stall. Said you were queer that way. But he said if I stuck to it, I’d get in. Said he could prove you weren’t full up. So I’m sticking to it. How much for—?”

“Who are you talking about?” queried Vail. “Who’s ‘he’? And—”

“Here’s his card,” responded Joshua Q. Mosely, groping in an inner pocket. “Met him on the steps of the Red Lion—at Stockbridge, you know—this morning. They’d told us they hadn’t a room left there. Same thing at Haddon Hall. Same thing at Pittsfield. Same thing at Lenox. Same at Lee. Full everywhere. Gee, but you Berkshire hotel men must be making a big turnover, this season! Yep, here’s his card. Thought I’d lost it.”

He fished out a slightly crumpled oblong of stiff paper and handed it to Vail. Thaxton read: “Mr. Osmun Creede, ‘Canobie,’ Aura, Massachusetts.”

“We were coming out of the Red Lion,” resumed Joshua Q. Mosely. “Figured we’d have[68] to drive all the way to Greenfield or maybe to Springfield, before we could get rooms. We didn’t want to do that. We wanted another day in this region and then make the thirty-mile run to Williamstown and back to North Adams and over the Mohawk Trail to—”

[68]

“Quite so,” cut in Vail. “What has all this to do with—?”

“I was coming to that. We were standing there on the steps, jawing about it, the wife and me, when up comes this Mr. Creede. He’d been sitting on the porch there and he’d overheard us. He hands me his card and he says: ‘You can get into Vailholme if you’re a mind to,’ he says. ‘Most excloosive hotel in the Berkshires. Not like any other place in America. Best food. Best rooms. They never advertise. So they aren’t full up,’ he says. ‘They try to keep folks away. But give Mr. Vail this card and tell him I’ll know who to go to with information if he refuses to take in people who can’t get accommodations elsewhere; and he’ll take you in.’ I thought maybe he was jollying me.”

“I—”

“He looked kind of funny while he talked to me,” prattled Mosely, unheeding. “So I asked the day clerk at the Red Lion about it.[69] The clerk said he knew you run a hotel, because he’d read about it in the paper. And he guessed you weren’t full up. So here I came. And your—your head 

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