“It were only a matter of minutes; but afore we’d been drawed up half of one afore the inn, a crowd was gathered round the coach door.
“ ‘Is he back?’ says the fat man—‘Is Cato come back with a doctor? No, I won’t have him touched or moved till a doctor’s seen him.’
“Then all at once he was up and out, rampageous.
“ ‘Where is he?’ he shrieks. ‘I can’t vait no longer—I’m goin’ mad—I’ll find one myself’—and, afore you could say Jack Robinson, he was off. I never see sich a figger run so. He fair melted away. But the crowd was too interested in the corpse to follow him.
“Well, sir, he didn’t come back with a doctor, and no more did Cato. And the corpse may have sat there ten minutes, and none daring to go into it, when a sawbones, a-comin’ down the street on his own account, was appealed to by the landlord for a verdict, seein’ as how by this time the whole traffic was blocked. He got in, and so did I; and he bent over the body spread back with its wraps agen the corner.
“ ‘My God!’ I whispers—‘there’s no breath comin’ from him. Is he dead, sir?’
“The sawbones he rose up very dry and cool.
“ ‘No,’ he says, ‘there ain’t no breath comin’ from him, nor there never will. It ain’t in natur’ to expect it from a waxworks.’
“Sir, I tell you I looked at him and just felt my heart as it might be a snail that someun had dropped a pinch of salt on.
“ ‘Waxworks!’ I says, gaspin’. ‘Why, the man spoke and groaned!’