“Cooking? Gas plate?” muttered Mr. Gooley. “Don't say you ain't got one!” cried Mrs. Hinkley. “You all got 'em! Every last one of you! Don't you try to come none of your sweet innocence dodges over me. I know you, and the whole tribe of you! I ain't kept lodgers for thirty years without knowing the kind of people they be! 'Gas plate! Gas plate!' says you, as innocent as if you didn't know what a gas plate was! You got it hid here somewheres, and I ain't going to stir from this room until I get my hands on it and squash it under my feet! Come across with it, Mr. Gooley, come across with it!” “But I _haven't_ one,” said Mr. Gooley, very ill and very weary. “You can look, if you want to.” And he lay back upon the bed. The cockroach slyly withdrew himself from the ceiling, came down the wall, and crawled to the foot of the bed again. If Mrs. Hinkley noticed him, she said nothing; perhaps it was not a part of her professional policy to draw attention to cockroaches on the premises. She stood and regarded Mr. Gooley for some moments, while he turned his head away from her in apathy. Her first anger seemed to have spent itself. But finally, with a new resolution, she said: “And look I will! You got one, or else that blondined party in the next room has lied.” She went into the closet and he heard her opening his trunk. She pulled it into the bedroom and examined the interior. It didn't take long. She dived under the bed and drew out his battered suitcase, so dilapidated that he had not been able to get a quarter for it at the pawnshop, but no more dilapidated than his trunk. She seemed struck, for the first time since her entrance, with the utter bareness of the room. Outside of the bed, one chair, the bureau, and Mr. Cooley's broken shoes at the foot of the bed, there was absolutely nothing in it. She sat down in the chair beside the bed. “Mr. Gooley,” she said, “you _ain't_ got any gas plate.” “No,” he said. “Mr. Gooley,” she said, “you got _nothing at all._ “No,” he said, “nothing.” “You had a passel of books and an overcoat five or six weeks ago,” she said, “when you come here. It was seein' them books, and knowing what you was four or five years ago, when you lived here once before, that made me sure you was a gentleman.” Mr. Gooley made no reply. The cockroach on the foot of the bed also seemed to be listening to see if Mrs. Hinkley had anything more to say, and suspending judgment. “Mr. Gooley,” said the landlady, “I beg your pardon. You was lied on by one that has a gas plate herself, and when I taxed her with it, and took it away from her, and got rid of her, she had the impudence to say she thought it was _allowed_, and that everybody done it, and named you as one that did.” Mrs. Hinkley paused, but neither Mr. Gooley nor the cockroach had anything to contribute to the conversation.