Chapter 5

SUNNY BOY LOSES HIS ROOM

Of course Sunny Boy wanted to see the boats race, and he hung breathlessly over the edge of the tank while the good-natured clerk wound up the motor-boats and sent them racing across several times.

"Come, dear," Mrs. Horton urged at last. "You haven't seen the trains yet, nor the rocking-horses. And Daddy will be waiting for us at one, you know."

So Sunny Boy, very reluctantly, thanked the man in charge of the boats and walked down the aisle to see the mechanical trains.

Goodness! the trains were more fascinating than the boats. There were miles and miles of track, and little colored signal lights, and stations and tunnels and freight and coal and passenger trains, with freight and coal and passengers to go in them.

"All running!" marveled Sunny Boy. "Just like Christmas!"

Mrs. Horton was trying to pull him past this absorbing counter, for they really had a great deal more to see and the time was getting short, when Sunny gave a shout.

"Mother, look! There's a runaway engine! Whee, a wreck!"

Sure enough, an engine with no cars attached was coming rapidly down grade toward a passenger train stopped at one of the stations. Sunny Boy's voice had drawn a number of the shoppers, and a small crowd gathered to see what would happen. The clerk had left the counter and gone out to an aisle table to have a floor-man sign his book, and there was no one about to prevent the wreck.

Smash! with a truly thrilling noise the engine crashed into the train and the passengers must have, as the newspapers say, "received a severe shaking up."

"Oh, gee!" breathed Sunny Boy, and his sigh was echoed by the grown-ups.

People looked at one another and smiled.

"Nobody hurt!" announced the clerk, who had hurried back when he heard the noise of the collision. "I said that switch needed overhauling yesterday. Guess I'll shut off the current and get a repair man to come up."

As there would be no more moving trains for the present, Sunny Boy was willing to go to see the rocking-horses. He had a fine time, too, for the clerk lifted him up on the largest one, and very high from the ground Sunny felt.

But it was the tin automobile that captured his heart.

"Oh, Mother!" he said when he found it, "it's just like our car, two lamps and all."

"It is pretty nice," admitted Mrs. Horton. "We'll have to see what Daddy says about one when we go home. You are getting too old for the kiddie car, aren't you? How does this one run, dear?"

Sunny Boy showed her, and explained how the brakes worked, and they had an interesting half-hour comparing the different kinds of cars and learning how much they cost. Then Mother discovered that it was time to go back to the hotel if they were to meet Daddy promptly.

"I could stay here," suggested Sunny Boy, his arm about a stuffed camel that was almost large enough for him to ride. His jaw went up and down if you poked it right, and he had two most realistic humps. "You could go and see Daddy and then come back and get me."

"But, precious, what would Daddy say? He'll want to see you. And there will be many other times for you to come over and visit the toys. Besides, think, Sunny--suppose he wanted to take you riding on the Fifth Avenue bus?"

That settled it. Sunny Boy was ready to go immediately. Anyway, he realized that he had a queer feeling he couldn't just name, but he suspected that maybe he was hungry.

They found Mr. Horton waiting for them in their room, and Mrs. Horton had so much to tell him that Sunny Boy had to wait his chance to ask a most important question.

"Daddy," he began when his father finished telling the waiter what to bring, and after they were in the dining room and seated at the table, "Daddy, do you think p'haps we could go riding on the bus?"

Mr. Horton smiled.

"Well, I'll tell you," he said, glancing at his watch. "Mother wants to lie down and rest a bit this afternoon and I have to meet some men within an hour. But if you are a good boy, I'll take you when I come back. That will be about three o'clock. How'll that do?"

Sunny Boy thought that would be very nice, and he ate his luncheon contentedly. Afterward he and Mother went upstairs, and Daddy had to go and keep his appointment.

"Now you see how much company we are for each other," said Mother, as she changed her dress and put on a pretty blue dressing gown. "With such a busy Daddy, wouldn't we be lonesome here in New York all alone?"

Sunny Boy nodded solemnly.

"Could I paint pictures?" he asked hopefully.

"Of course. You'll find your paint box and a pad of paper in that grey box in the trunk tray. Mother's going to lie down just a second. Pull the little table over to the light, dear, and you'll have a nice, quiet time," directed Mrs. Horton.

Sunny Boy dragged the table over nearer to the window, found his water color paints and the paper and set to work to paint a picture. He talked a steady stream to Mother at first but, as he grew interested in his work, he forgot to talk.

"There now!" he said softly, when he had finished three pictures. "I think they're good. I'll show 'em to Mother."

But Mother was fast asleep. Sunny Boy tiptoed carefully around the bed, but she did not wake up.

"I don't want to paint any more," decided Sunny Boy. "What'll I do?"

He remembered the bell-boy they had seen first the night before. He would go and visit him.

Sunny Boy opened the door into the corridor carefully, so as not to disturb Mother, and closed it carefully behind him. The halls were lighted, though it was daytime, and the thick carpet was so soft that Sunny couldn't hear the noise of his own feet.

"Where 'bouts," he speculated aloud, "do they have the stairs in this house?"

He hunted for several minutes, but no stairs could he find. Then he decided to go back to Mother, and he couldn't find the room! He had made so many turnings in the halls that he was hopelessly lost.

"Oh, dear!" sighed poor Sunny Boy. "New York is such a big place!"

A light down the corridor attracted his attention now. The elevator, of course! Why hadn't he thought of that? He would find the bell-boy downstairs. He remembered that was where he had seen him at breakfast time.

The elevator boy took him downstairs without asking any questions and let him off at the first floor.

"This looks somehow different," puzzled Sunny Boy, standing where the elevator left him.

He didn't know it, but it was another elevator, in a different part of the building from the one his father and mother took down to the dining room. Sunny Boy had never been downstairs alone, and he felt decidedly shy.

"Hello, kid, what you lost?" asked one of the bell boys, swinging past him.

"Nothing," murmured Sunny Boy.

"Are you lost, dear?" asked a lady, stopping on her way to the elevator. She was old and lame and walked with a cane. A maid, with a curly black dog under her arm, walked beside her.

Sunny shook his head. How could he be lost with a mother in the same building with him? Of course he wasn't lost!

He sat down in a leather chair to consider. He didn't know the name of the bell boy he wanted to see, and at any minute his father might come back and want to take him for a ride on the bus. Sunny Boy made up his mind that he would try to find his room and look for the bell boy another time. He waited till a friendly-looking man came hurrying by where he sat.

"Please," he stuttered nervously, "how do you find--"

"Ask the clerk at the desk!" snapped the man, who wasn't cross, but only in a hurry to make a train.

Sunny Boy looked about for the desk.

"Go 'round there," directed the elevator boy when he ventured to ask him. Then he clashed his door shut with a bang and went sailing up in his little car.

Sunny obediently wandered around a turn in the corridor. He saw only a counter, but he guessed that to be the desk. He remembered it was where his father had gone to arrange for their rooms the night before.

"Please," he began, standing on tiptoes and grasping the edge of the counter with both hands. "Please, where is our room?"

"Eh, what?" demanded the startled clerk, bending down to see the small person speaking to him. "Your room? Have you lost your key?"

"Haven't any key," explained Sunny Boy gravely. "I came out, and when I went to go back I couldn't find our door."

"All right, we'll fix you up," promised the clerk. "Jack, lift this young man up so I won't have to strain my voice."

A bell-boy lifted Sunny to the counter, and he sat there comfortably, sure that the clerk would solve his troubles for him.

"What floor are you on?" asked the clerk capably.

"I don't know," confessed Sunny Boy.

"Well, then, give us your name."

"Sunny Boy," announced Sunny cheerfully.

The clerk laughed, and the bell-boys standing about snickered.

"No Sunny Boy registered," announced the clerk, running his finger down the register, where hotel guests write their names. "Haven't you any other name you use when you're traveling around?"

"Oh, no," insisted Sunny Boy. "Daddy and Mother always call me that--just Sunny Boy."

"But you have to have a regular name," protested the clerk. "When you go to school--Oh, you don't go to school! Well, what is Daddy's name? Your last name must be the same as his."

Then Sunny Boy understood.

"Daddy's name is Harry Horton, and I am named for Grandpa, Arthur Bradford Horton," he announced rapidly. "An' we live in Centronia."

"Now you're talking," said the clerk approvingly. "Here you are." He read from the big register: "'Mr. and Mrs. Harry Horton and son'. You're son. And your room is 1038. Jack, you take him up, will you? Is any one there, or have they gone out and left you alone?"

Sunny Boy explained that his mother was lying down, and Jack lifted him from the counter and went over with him to the elevator.

"He lost his room," he told the elevator boy as they shot up. "Didn't you bring him down?"

"Must have come down in one of the other cars," said the elevator boy. "I don't remember him. Here's your floor."

Jack showed Sunny Boy which was the door to his room, and, still grinning at the idea of losing one's way in a hotel, he went back.

"Why, Sunny dear, where have you been?" Mrs. Horton was sitting up in bed as Sunny Boy came in. "I woke up a minute ago and thought you were still painting. Then I spoke to you and found you weren't in the room. Where did you go?"

"I got lost," said Sunny Boy placidly.

He told his mother what had happened and she laughed.

"Here's Daddy," she announced, as some one rapped on the door. "Come in, Harry. Sunny Boy's adventures in New York have already begun."

So Mr. Horton heard the story.

"Well, well, we'll have to go out for our ride, or there's no knowing what will happen next," he said jokingly. "Want to come, Olive?"

Mrs. Horton answered that she didn't want to dress hurriedly and that she would rather wait for them and write a letter or two, perhaps.

"I'll help you write your post cards in the morning," she promised Sunny Boy. "Harriet will be expecting a card from you every day till it comes."

Sunny Boy and his father went out of the hotel and walked over toward Fifth Avenue. The trolley cars and automobiles and crowds of people seemed to Sunny Boy to be hopelessly mixed. He held tightly to Daddy's hand when they crossed the street, and he was very grateful to the tall policeman that made the traffic stop while the people surged safely across.

"Up top, you know, Daddy," he urged, trotting along, trying to keep step with his father's long stride.

"All right, up top we'll go," said Mr. Horton, smiling. "I thought we'd walk around to the Pennsylvania station and get a bus there. We may want to go home from there instead of the way we came."