keeping
open after hours. That made one conviction. On the top of this had come
the untoward incident just mentioned and that made two. Beyond that
was the deluge. This then was the exact situation when Billy, the desk
clerk, entered the back bar with the telegram in his hand.

"Here's your wire, sir," he said.

"What does it say?" said Mr. Smith.

He always dealt with written documents with a fine air of detachment. I
don't suppose there were ten people in Mariposa who knew that Mr. Smith
couldn't read.

Billy opened the message and read, "Commissioners give you three months
to close down."

"Let me read it," said Mr. Smith, "that's right, three months to close
down."

There was dead silence when the message was read. Everybody waited for
Mr. Smith to speak. Mr. Gingham instinctively assumed the professional
air of hopeless melancholy.

As it was afterwards recorded, Mr. Smith stood and "studied" with the
tray in his hand for at least four minutes. Then he spoke.

"Boys," he said, "I'll be darned if I close down till I'm ready to close
down. I've got an idee. You wait and I'll show you."

And beyond that, not another word did Mr. Smith say on the subject.

But within forty-eight hours the whole town knew that something was
doing. The hotel swarmed with carpenters, bricklayers and painters.
There was an architect up from the city with a bundle of blue prints
in his hand. There was an engineer taking the street level with a
theodolite, and a gang of navvies with shovels digging like fury as if
to dig out the back foundations of the hotel.

"That'll fool 'em," said Mr. Smith.

Half the town was gathered round the hotel crazy with excitement. But
not a word would the proprietor say. Great dray loads of square timber,
and two-by-eight pine joists kept arriving from the planing mill. There
was a pile of matched spruce sixteen feet high lying by the sidewalk.

Then the excavation deepened and the dirt flew, and the beams went up
and the joists across, and all the day from dawn till dusk the hammers
of the carpenters clattered away, working overtime at time and a half.

"It don't matter what it costs," said Mr. Smith; "get it done."

Rapidly the structure took form. It extended down the side street,
joining the hotel at a right angle. Spacious and graceful it looked as
it reared its uprights into the air.

Already you could see the place where the row of windows was to come, a
veritable palace of glass, it