Chapter XVIII
THE hall porter pushed the Gazzetino under the door, and the Colonel had it, noiselessly, almost as soon as it had passed through the slit.
He very nearly took it from the hall porter’s hand. He did not like the hall porter since he had found him, one day, going through his bag, when he, the Colonel, had re-entered the room after having left it, presumably for some time. He had to come back to the room to get his bottle of the medicine, which he had forgotten, and the hall porter was well through his bag.
“I guess you don’t say stick them up in this hotel,” the Colonel had said. “But you’re no credit to your town.”
There was silence produced, and re-produced, by the striped waist-coated man with the Fascist face, and the Colonel said, “Go on, boy, look through the rest of it. I don’t carry any military secrets with my toilet articles.” Since then, there was scant friendship between them, and the Colonel enjoyed trying
