“Can you give me the room exactly opposite 77 on the seventh floor?” The clerk hesitated, then said: “Just a minute, please.” He consulted one of the bookkeepers, from whom he must have learned whose son Tom was. And, though Boston is not New York, money is money, even in Massachusetts; and the heir to fifty or a hundred million dollars is something, whether or not he is somebody. “Certainly,” said the clerk, and handed the key to a young man called, in New York, a bell-boy. The young man now preceded Tom to the seventh floor and ushered the New-Yorker into Room 78. Tom gave the studious youth a dollar and never noticed that the boy regarded the bill with a mixture of suspicion and alarm, put it gingerly into his pocket, and left the room, closing the door. Tom opened the door. The boy thought it had opened itself and returned to close it. Tom waved him away. The boy hastily retreated. He did not, however, throw away the dollar. He had discovered it was not “phony.” The bell-boy found the room clerk engaged in conversation with two men. He, divining that the talk concerned the generous lunatic, flung at the room clerk that look of exaggerated perplexity which will cause any normal human being inevitably to ask: “What is it?” The room clerk saw the look and still kept on talking with the men; whereupon the bell-boy walked up to the desk, frowned fiercely, and muttered, “He is in his room!” “What's that, boy?” “I said,” retorted the studious youth, glacially, “he was in his room--78. He gave me a dollar and left the door open. I tried to close it, but he opened it again--after he gave me the dollar.” The clerk, awe in his face, turned to the men and nodded confirmatively. “Your man!” he said. “Of course we don't want any fuss--” “We'll telephone Mr. McWayne, the private secretary. The young fellow isn't violent, you know.” The hotel clerk said the inevitable thing: “Only son, too--isn't he?” “Yes. Over a hundred million dollars, I've heard.” The detective, induced thereto by the invitation in the clerk's voice, had vouchsafed inside information. “Too bad!” murmured the clerk, thinking of the hundred million and Tom. “Too damned bad!” he almost whimpered, thinking of the hundred million and himself. To show that he was unimpressed by vast wealth he added, sternly, “No trouble, you understand!” One of the men whom McWayne had instructed to shadow Tom sat in the lobby just in front of the elevator. The other, with the clerk's permission, went up to the seventh floor and sat down by the floor telephone operator. From there he could keep a ten-dollar-a-day eye on Room 78.