It ain’t right and I won’t do it. They got me the license for to keep the caff and I’m going to keep the caff. I don’t need to close her. The bar’s good for anything from forty to a hundred a day now, with the Rats’ Cooler going good, and that caff will stay right here.”

And stay it did.

There it stands, mind you, to this day. You’ve only to step round the corner of Smith’s Hotel on the side street and read the sign: LADIES’ AND GENT’S CAFÉ, just as large and as imposing as ever.

Mr. Smith said that he’d keep the caff, and when he said a thing he meant it!

Of course there were changes, small changes.

I don’t say, mind you, that the fillet de beef that you get there now is perhaps quite up to the level of the filet de boeufs aux champignons of the days of glory.

No doubt the lamb chops in Smith’s Caff are often very much the same, nowadays, as the lamb chops of the Mariposa House or the Continental.

Of course, things like Omelette aux Trufles practically died out when Alphonse went. And, naturally, the leaving of Alphonse was inevitable. No one knew just when he went, or why. But one morning he was gone. Mr. Smith said that “Alf had to go back to his folks in the old country.”

So, too, when Alf left, the use of the French language, as such, fell off tremendously in the calf. Even now they use it to some extent. You can still get fillet de beef, and saucisson au juice, but Billy the desk clerk has considerable trouble with the spelling. The Rats’ Cooler, of course, closed down, or rather Mr. Smith closed it for repairs, and there is every likelihood that it will hardly open for three years. But the caff is there. They don’t use the grills, because there’s no need to, with the hotel kitchen so handy.

The “girl room,” I may say, was never opened. Mr. Smith promised it, it is true, for the winter, and still talks of it. But somehow there’s been a sort of feeling against it. Every one in town admits that every big hotel in the city has a “girl room” and that it must be all right. Still, there’s a certain—well, you know how sensitive opinion is in a place like Mariposa.

TWO

THE SPECULATIONS OF JEFFERSON THORPE

It was not until the mining boom, at the time when everybody went simply crazy over the Cobalt and Porcupine mines of the new silver country near the Hudson Bay, that Jefferson Thorpe reached what you might call public importance in Mariposa.

Of course everybody knew Jeff and his little barber shop that stood just across the street from Smith’s Hotel. Everybody knew him and everybody got shaved there. From early morning, when the commercial travellers off the 6.30 express got shaved into the resemblance of human beings, there were always people going in and out of the barber shop.

Mullins, the manager of the Exchange Bank, took his morning shave from Jeff as a form of resuscitation, with enough wet towels laid on his face to stew him and with Jeff moving about in the steam, razor in hand, as grave as an operating surgeon.

Then, as I think I said, Mr. Smith came in every morning and there was a tremendous outpouring of Florida water and rums, essences and revivers and renovators, regardless of expense. What with Jeff’s white coat and Mr. Smith’s flowered waistcoat and the red geranium in the window and the Florida water and the double extract of hyacinth, the little shop seemed multi-coloured and luxurious enough for the annex of a Sultan’s harem.

But what I mean is that, till the mining boom, Jefferson Thorpe never occupied a position of real prominence in Mariposa. You couldn’t, for example, have compared him with a man like Golgotha Gingham, who, as undertaker, stood in a direct relation to life and death, or to Trelawney, the postmaster, who drew money from the Federal Government of Canada, and was regarded as virtually a member of the Dominion Cabinet.

Everybody knew Jeff and liked him, but the odd thing was that till he made money nobody took any stock in his ideas at all. It was only after he made the “clean up” that they came to see what a splendid fellow he was. “Levelheaded” I think was the term; indeed in the speech of Mariposa, the highest form of endowment was to have the head set on horizontally as with a theodolite.

As I say, it was when Jeff made money that they saw how gifted he was, and when he lost it,—but still, there’s no need to go into that.