Fatigue that night made him wakeful. His companion in the other bed was wakeful too. In talking from bed to bed Tom found it a comfort to be dealing with an easy conscience. Mr. Honeybun had nothing on his mind, nor was he subject to nightmares. Speculation on the subject of Quidmore's disappearance, and possible fate, turned round and round on itself, to begin again with the selfsame guesses.
"And there's another thing," came from Mr. Honeybun. "If he don't come back, why, you'll come in for a good bit o' proputty, won't yer? Didn't he own that market-garden place, out there on the edge of Connecticut?"
"He left it to his sister. He told me that the other night. You see, I wasn't his real son. I wasn't his son at all till about a year ago."
This statement coming to Mr. Honeybun as something of a shock, Tom was obliged to tell the story of his life to the extent that he knew it. The only details that he touched on lightly were those which bore on the manner in which he had lost his "mudda." Even now it was difficult to name her in any other way, because in no other way had he ever named her. Obliged to blur the outlines of his earliest recollections, which in themselves were clear enough, his tale was brief.
"So yer real name is Whitelaw," Mr. Honeybun commented, with interest. "I never hear that name but once. That was the Whitelaw baby. Ye'll have heard tell o' that?"
Since Tom had never heard tell of the Whitelaw baby, the lack in his education was supplied. The Whitelaw baby had been taken out to the Park on a morning in May, and had vanished from its carriage. In the place where it had lain was found a waxen image so true in likeness to the child himself that only when it came time to feed him did the nurse make the discovery that she had wheeled home a replica. The mystery had been the source of nation-wide excitement for the best part of two years. It was talked of even now. It couldn't have been more than three or four years earlier that Mr. Honeybun had seen a daily paper, bearing the headlines that Harry Whitelaw had been found, selling like hotcakes to the women shopping in Twenty-third Street.
"And was he?" Tom asked, beginning at last to be sleepy.
"No more'n a puff of tobacker smoke when yer'd blowed it in the air. The father, a rich banker—a young chap he was, too, I believe—he offers a reward of fifty thousand dollars to anyone as'd put him on the track o' the gang what had kidnapped the young 'un; and every son of a gun what thought he was a socialist was out to win the money. This 'ere Goody, he had a scheme. Tried to work me in on it, and I don't know but what I might a took a 'and if a chum o' mine hadn't got five year for throwin' the same 'ook without no bait on it. They 'auled in another chap I knowed, what they was sure he had somethink to do with it, and tried to make him squeal; but—" A long breath from Tom interrupted this flow of narrative. "Say, kiddy, yer ain't asleep, are yer? and me tellin' yer about the Whitelaw baby?"
"I am nearly," the boy yawned. "Good night—Honey! Wake me in time in the morning."
"That's a good name for yer to call me," the next o' kin commended. "I'll always be Honey to you, and you'll be Kiddy to me; and so we'll be pals. Buddies they call it over here."