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“So if you could just ring me up here in Suite Five-B any time that’s handy for you, we can arrange details, etc.

“Hoping you are in the best of health, I am Yours sincerely.

“As soon as you get that typed—I’ve had ’em bring up a machine and stick it in my bedroom—get a bell boy to hustle it right down to Siddy’s suite. We gotta get action. Shoot!”

And Bessie scampered happily out to the foyer to hire a maid, and to engage for Terry a lugubrious valet.

His name was Humberstone. He had, of course, never served anyone of lesser degree than a duke, and he would require two pounds extra a week to associate with Americans. He got it. He was worth it. Even a boy king from Slovaria would be impressed by Humberstone’s egg-shaped head.

Bessie proudly let this four-pounds-a-week worth of noble valet into the bedroom. On the floor, extremely linty, sat two small boys whom Humberstone eyed with malevolence. Ginger quaked. Terry looked irritated.

“Sonny dear, this is your new valet,” crooned Bessie, with a maternal sweetness alarming to her well-trained son.

Humberstone eyed the railwaymen with the eye of an ogre who liked little boys nicely fried, with onion sauce. Under that smug glare, the first excited gayety that Terry had shown these many weeks died out.

“Oh, I don’t need a valet, Mother!”

“And who, Master Smarty, do you think is going to look out for your clothes? You certainly don’t expect me to, I hope! Humberstone, you can sleep here in this dressing room. Now get busy and press Master Terry’s clothes. ”

When Humberstone had gone out with an armful of clothes and when Bessie had left them, the two playmates sat on a couch, too dispirited to go on happily wrecking trains.

“Gee, that’s fierce, that man-eating valet,” confided Terry.

“Right you are. ‘E’s ‘orrible,” said his friend Ginger.

“He’s a big stiff!”

“‘E is that! ‘E’s an old buffins. ”

“It’s fierce, Ginger. We won’t stand it!”

“It is that, Terry. We won’t!”

“We’ll run away. To Poppy Peaks!”

“Is that your ranch?”

Now when Terry comes to Heaven’s gate and has to explain to Saint Peter the extreme untruth of what he said about bears and the wild free life of the ranches, let us trust that the wise old saint will understand that Terry had long been overadmired for silly things like having cherubic lips and silky hair, and never been admired for the proper things, such as the ability to ride mustangs, lasso steers and shoot Indians, which, unquestionably, he would have demonstrated if only he had ever been nearer a ranch than Main Street, Los Angeles.

“Yes, sure, it’s our ranch. Gee, I’m going to get Mother to invite you there. We live in a big log cabin, and every night, gee, you can hear the grizzly bears howling!”

“My word! I say, did you ever shoot a grizzly bear?”

“Oh, not awful many, but couple of times. ”

“Tell me about it. Were you with Will Rogers or Hoot Gibson?”

“Both of them. There was Bill and Hoot and Doug Fairbanks and—uh— and there was Will Beebe, the nachalist, and we all went up camping in the—uh—in the Little Bighorn Valley—that’s on our ranch, Poppy Peaks—and one night I was sleeping out in the sagebrush, all rolled up in my blankets, and I woke up and I heard something going snuffle-snuffle-snuffle, and I looked up and there was a great, big, tall, huge figger—”

“My ‘at!”

“—just like a great, big, enormous man, only twict as big, and like he had an awful’ thick fur coat, and gee, I was scared, but I reached out my hand and I grabbed my dad’s rifle, and I aimed—I just took a long careful aim—”

“My word!”

“—and I let her go, bang! and the bear he fell—no, at first he didn’t fall right down dead, but he kind of staggered like he was making for me—”

“My aunt!”

“—but my shot’d woke up everybody, and Harold Lloyd, no, Richard Bart’lemess it was—he grabbed up his gun and he shot and the bear fell down right beside me, with its awful hot breath stirring my hair, and then it just flopped a couple of times and bing! it was dead!”

“My!”

“But I bet you’ve had some adventures, Ginger. Don’t all English kids go to sea as cabin boys?”