“Maybe so,” says he.
“They were smart enough to git your pa’s engine, and I bet they’re smart enough to keep it, leastways so far as us kids is concerned. Seems to me we went at it wrong. Hadn’t there ought to be some way of gittin’ back that engine without smougin’ it this way? I bet there is. What we should ’a’ done was to go to some man in Wicksville we could trust and find out what to do.”
He didn’t say anything, but looked like he’d lost his last friend. Anybody could see I was right, and he couldn’t do anything else but admit it, but admitting wasn’t one of the things Marcus Aurelius Fortunatus Tidd hankered to do oftener than was necessary.
“And,” says I, “so far’s scarin’ ’em goes, what good’ll it do? Maybe we kin keep old Willis hoppin’, and maybe we kin make Batten and the other feller a little nervous, but with them it ain’t goin’ to last. They’re city men, and eddicated men, and when they git to thinkin’ it over they’re goin’ to be more mad than scairt, and they’ll be lookin’ to see who’s puttin’ up a job on ’em. Ghosts is all right for old codgers like Willis, but you got to trot out a perty lively sperret to keep Henry C. Batten a-guessin’ long.”
While I was talking Mark was cocking his ear up the road, and I stopped to listen. Faint-like we could hear a rattling, and a tinny sort of sound, with a whistle going high over it all, a whistle that was whistling “Marching Through Georgia” with bird warbles and jumps and trills and things all scattered through. It kept coming closer and closer and louder and louder. We crept out and looked up the road. It was a horse and wagon, a big wooden wagon, painted the kind of red that railroads paint their box-cars; and it looked pretty much like a little box-car for a horse to draw. There wasn’t anything funny about it, for that kind of wagons came through Wicksville half a dozen times a year. It was a tin peddler who traded dishpans and stuff like that for old rags and rubber and what-not. Sometimes they’d have a big bundle of buggy whips besides the tinware.
The driver was lopping back on his seat, with his nose pointed straight up, whistling away like he was paid for it by the hour. You couldn’t see much of his face but the under side of his chin, which isn’t rightly face at all, I suppose. When he got opposite us I began whistling “Marching Through Georgia,” too, as loud as I could. He brought his head down slow and sat up, never missing a note. Then he jerked on the lines to stop the horse and looked down at us, his face all puckered up with his whistling, and went right on until he got to the end of the verse. He was an oldish fellow, with one of those long, thin faces, sort of caved in at the cheeks, that usually go with lean six-footers. His skin was wrinkled and brown, and his eyes, which had a lot of wrinkles running every which way from them, were brown, too. His hair wasn’t red, and it wasn’t yellow, and it wasn’t any other color I ever heard of. He quit whistling, as I said, when he got to the end of the verse; but he didn’t speak right off, only looked at us and felt of his nose, wiggling it a little with his fingers like he wanted to make sure it was on right and wasn’t likely to go flying off unexpected. Then he spoke with a voice that was little and squeaky and raspy.
“My name,” says he, “is Zadok Biggs. I venture to say you never heard that name before—Zadok. No? It is rare, very rare. It was given to me in a spirit of prophesy, of prophesy by my father, a remarkable man. Zadok, my friends, is from the Hebrew, and signifies Just. You see! Just Biggs is my name, then—and it fits. Nobody can deny that it fits. Just by name and just by nature. To that I may add just by habit and just in dealings. I have a judicial mind, my friends and who knows, had not commerce lured me from my books, but I might have risen to greatness in the law—even to the bench of the Supreme Court in Washington? Who can say?”
None of us could, so we kept still about it.
He kept right on. “Ah, you look pleasant, and you listen well. I will dismount—climb down is the commoner expression—and rest with you.”
He got down clumsily and when he stood on the ground we saw that he wasn’t five feet high, but almost three feet wide. You looked at his face, and felt sure it belonged to a man six foot six long by a foot wide and skinny; then you looked at the rest of him and—well, he didn’t match. He’d got hold of the wrong head somewhere.