Though door and window were shut,
there came from this room, as if through pores of the wood and the
glass, a strong odor of tobacco smoke. A voice within could be heard
softly humming an operatic air.
Wesley Tiffles opened the door with a latch key, saying, "All right!" in
a loud voice, as he did so. Marcus entered with him into a blue cloud of
smoke heated to a sickly degree by a small coal stove with a prodigious
quantity of pipe. Even Marcus's hardened lungs found it difficult
to breathe.
The room was about twenty feet square. It had been a part of the laundry
when the building was a hotel. The walls, from the floor to the low
ceiling, appeared to be hung with a strange, dim tapestry. A second
glance convinced Marcus Wilkeson that this seeming tapestry was the
panorama, which was fastened on stretchers along three sides of the
room, and rolled up in a corner as fast as completed. At the farther end
of the room, barely visible through the smoke, was the figure of a man
in a torn and dirty dressing gown, and an enormous black felt hat with a
huge turn-up brim, of the kind supposed to be worn by the bandits of the
Pyrenees.
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