This new disturbance which came through the thin partition separating his room from Dill's was like the soft patter of feet--bare feet--running around and around. Even a sudden desire for exercise seemed an inadequate explanation in view of the frigid temperature of the uncarpeted rooms. Bruce was still more mystified when he heard Dill hurdling a chair, and utterly so when his neighbor began dragging a wash-stand into the centre of the room. Making all due allowance for the eccentricities of Yellow-Legs, Bruce concluded that something was amiss, so, slipping into his shoes, he tapped upon the stranger's door.
The activity within continuing, he turned the knob and stepped inside where Mr. Dill was working like a beaver trying to add a heavy home-made bureau to the collection in the middle of the floor. Shivering in his striped pajamas he was staring vacantly when Bruce lighted the lamp and touched him on the shoulder.
"You'd better hop into bed, mister."
Mr. Dill mumbled as he swung his arms in the gesture of swimming.
"Got to keep movin'!"
"Wake up." Bruce shook him vigorously.
The suspected representative of the "Guggenheimers" whined plaintively: "Itty tootsies awfy cold!"
"Itty tootsies will be colder if you don't get 'em off this floor," Bruce said with a grin, as he dipped his fingers in the pitcher and flirted the ice water in his face.
"Oh--hello!" Intelligence returned to Mr. Dill's blank countenance. "Why, I must have been walking in my sleep. I always do when I sleep in a strange place, but I thought I'd locked myself in. I dreamed I was a fish freezing up in a cake of ice."
"It's not surprising."
"Say." Mr. Dill looked at him wistfully as he stood on one foot curling his purple toes around the other knee. "I wonder if you'd let me get in with you? I'm liable to do it again--sleeping cold and all."
"Sure," said Bruce sociably, leading the way. "Come ahead."
The somnambulist chattered: "I've been put out of four hotels already for walking into other people's rooms, and once I got arrested. I've doctored for it."
While lamenting his inability to discuss his proposition with the engineer, the last thing Bruce anticipated was to be engaged before daylight in the humane and neighborly act of warming Wilbur Dill's back, but so it is that Chance, that humorous old lady, thrusts Opportunity in the way of those in whom she takes an interest.
Bruce was so full of his subject that he saw nothing unusual in propounding his questions in Mr. Dill's ear under the covers in the middle of the night.