“Then, good father, hear me! I seek to do no man wrong. I am helpless in a world of plotting and troubles and I seek only a place where I may this night provide shelter for my good wife and my boy.”
“Come with me then,” said the scholar-priest. “I will at least offer you the hospitality that my cell affords. . . . Nay—hitch your horses to the wagon and drive through that lane yonder which leads to the Street of St. Ann.”
Pan Andrew was already adjusting the harnesses when Joseph tugged at his sleeve. “Father,” he urged, “father, I know of a place where we can stay.”
The father looked down at him in astonishment. “You,” he answered, “you? And how did you find such a place?”
“A scholar and his niece live there. They took me to their house. There is a space below them at the head of a flight of stairs.”
Jan Kanty interposed. “Come at any rate to my dwelling, and there we can make plans. If the boy has found a place, and his face and words seem truthful, then we can talk at better length there at our ease than here in the busy square.”
A few minutes later they stopped in front of the largest of a number of buildings which made up the university. On the way there Joseph had noted that almost every man they passed on the street had doffed his hat to Jan Kanty, and once a whole company of knights had saluted him with drawn swords. He seemed to pay but little attention to these courtesies, however, for his mind was busy with the problem of the present, and when he alighted from the cart and led the three to his little cell on the ground floor just at the right of the door, he was still pondering.
Once inside the house, however, Pan Andrew, disregarding Joseph’s information for the minute, begged an immediate audience with Jan Kanty alone, and while the boy and his mother were eating some food which the scholar had placed upon a table in the corridor just outside his cell, he began to address his host in a low tone.
Their voices buzzed as Joseph and his mother ate. Only once did the boy catch distinct syllables, and that was when the priest asked Pan Andrew, “That, then, is the pumpkin that you have brought from the Ukraine?”
Pan Andrew must have nodded, for he made no verbal answer. He had not dropped the precious vegetable from his hands during the entire conversation. Joseph heard no more of the talk, for he began at that moment to tell his mother of his own adventures of the morning.