"Golly Moses!" Chris exclaimed, completely baffled.
He returned to the examination of the clothes that were obviously laid out for him. There was a fine white shirt with full sleeves and turned-back cuffs. White cotton stockings; knee breeches of a blue-gray worsted material, and matching frock coat with silver carved buttons. Below the chair, Chris saw, was a pair of black leather shoes with polished silver buckles.
"Fancy dress, huh?" Chris murmured, and then, as if he had been slapped into full awareness, came the remembrance of the evening before, of Mr. Wicker, and of the dark flickering shop.
Chris sat down suddenly on the edge of the bed, his mouth, in spite of all his efforts, drawn down at the corners, and his eyes blank with confusion and misery.
"Oh my golly!" Chris said, and stared at the clothes he still held in his hands.
Then another idea struck him, and he jumped up to run to the nearest dormer window, the floorboards, where the sun had lain on them, warm under his bare feet.
But no. No freeway, no factories. The window looked out over Water Street, skirting the edge of the Potomac banks, and there below Chris's amazed eyes rose a forest of masts and spars of ships at anchor along the shore. Water Street, below him, was swarming with activity, but not the activity that Chris had previously known. Men dressed in the same sort of clothes as those laid out for him pushed at cotton bales, rolled hogsheads along to the docks, or rowed out to ships anchored in midstream. Most of the stevedores were hatless, and Chris snickered at the sight of the short braid of hair at the napes of their necks. Many wore brilliant scarves tied around their heads, red, or mustard-yellow or green, and the sound of deep voices swearing, laughing, or rising in unfamiliar sea chanteys excited Chris and sent the blood tingling along his veins.
He rushed to the high-placed window overlooking Wisconsin Avenue. No Key Bridge was to be seen in the distance, only stretches of fields and orchards, scattered with occasional houses of russet brick, and when he craned his neck there was the inn where the People's Drugstore ought to be, the sign swinging high above the road.
Wisconsin Avenue! Chris had to laugh. If it could see itself! Only a wide muddy road full of ruts and puddles, along which someone's line of geese was waddling, impervious to the cursing of passing carters and riders on horseback. A little below him Chris could see the two old warehouses he remembered from the night before. But now they looked quite new, their bricks bright and their walls solid. Barrels were being lifted by the winch and tackle into the upper loft, and Chris watched the busy scene for quite some time.
His rolling stomach and a simultaneous smell of food reminded him of his hunger. Dressing quickly in the strange new clothes, he opened the door and peered outside.