we nearly met our Waterloo. Speak of bad business. It
was something weird."

"Misfortune and you must have been running a race."

"Yes, with the filly away in the lead. But we managed to play right on.
Sunday morning found me once more _hors de combat_, with another hotel
bill unpaid and an almost empty treasury to meet it. I nearly gave up in
despair. Remembering, however, that despair never yet pulled a man out
of a hole, in sheer desperation I resolved once more to fall back on the
expedient that carried us over the sea of troubles that beset us before
we reached Bungtown."

"Great Heavens! you don't mean to say you proposed to carry another
hotel clerk on your staff?" queried Fogg.

"I had to do something. Necessity is the prompter of ingenuity, and the
suggestion came from that source. There is no use in going further into
detail. I convinced the landlord and secured another secretary of the
treasury to look after the income, and we got out of town next morning
as happy as clams at high water. Well, without mincing matters, I must
say we had as rough a road to travel any band of poor strolling
Thespians ever struck."

"Misfortune still in the lead?"

"I should say so. Listen. We ran into the Gulf Stream of a red-hot
political campaign, and I needn't tell you these torchlight processions,
firework displays, and fife and drum corps knock the life out of the
show business. Where we made a few dollars in one place we dropped them
in another. Had it not been for a small reserve fund I had carefully
treasured up for extra hazardous emergencies and my peculiar talent and
diplomacy in dealing with hotel men, I verily believe it would have
taken us all the winter to have reached a hospitable haven of relief,
for the walking was wretched and Western railroad ties too far apart for
decent pedestrianism."

"By Jove!" smiled Fogg, "you must have had an anxious time from the word
go."

"Oh, that goes without saying. I managed to pull through and reached
good warm-hearted Chicago with nine hotel clerks on my staff, all acting
as treasurers, assistant treasurers, auditors, ticket-sellers,
bookkeepers and financial agents, each one wondering why the box office
department was receiving accessions to its ranks in the face of such bad
business."

"An' did they never tumble to the little joker?"

"Well, I candidly admit it required the exercise of considerable tact to
keep them in complete ignorance of the true situation.