"Yes, yes," he said, in a high shaking voice, "I'm lame; you're right there, sir. I've been lame these twenty years, and carrying down all them trunks has put sich a crick in my back as never was."
"I asked you your name," repeated his employer.
"When I came? Why, this afternoon, sir. It was your butler engaged me. I worked at the hotel here once, and Mr. Smithfield he come to my wife and says, 'Susan,' he says, he knowing her since he was a little boy—"
"Let me look at you," said Crane sternly.
But the elderly man, still talking to himself, retreated into the shadow.
And then Tucker was surprised to hear his host exclaim with violence:
"By Jove, the young devil," and to see him hurl himself off the piazza at its highest point. He would have landed actually on top of his decrepit servitor, had not the old man developed an activity utterly unsuspected by Tucker, which enabled him to get away down the avenue with a speed that Crane could not surpass.
"Well, well, what are we coming to?" Tucker murmured as he watched them dodge and double around trees and bushes. Presently they passed out of the light from the house, and only the sound of their feet beating on the hard avenue indicated that the fugitive had taken to the open.
Solon was still peering nervously into the dark when at last his host returned. Crane was breathing hard, and held in his hand a small furry object that Tucker made out gradually to be a neat gray wig.
"Oh," said Burton, still panting and slapping his side, "I haven't run so hard since I was in college. But I should have got him if it hadn't been for his superior knowledge of the ground."