It was no wonder that Officer Clancy was dazed and bewildered to hear Granny talk so glibly of queens and porches, but he stooped over the stranger, who curled up like a snail.
"Now then, my man, what are you doing here, frightening the ladies out of their wits?" asked Clancy sharply.
The stranger shrank away and muttered something. The words sounded like "The Shark! The Shark!" but Granny thought that her ears must have deceived her. A shark was a fish that lived in the ocean. There were no sharks in her neighborhood.
"The shark! The shark!" was all the stranger would say that any one could understand, although he stammered a lot of words that sounded like anything but language to the little group gathered around him.
"I can't make head nor tail of what he says!" Officer Clancy exclaimed helplessly. "I'll try him again. Now then, my man, what were you doing here?"
"On my nice clean porch!" added Granny shrilly.
But the man only muttered some more of the unintelligible gibberish jumbled around the word "Shark." Officer Clancy jerked him to his feet, and he stood leaning weakly against the policeman.
"I better take him along to the station," the latter suggested. "He hasn't done any harm, has he? Maybe he was taken sick as he was passing by, and came in to get help," he suggested eagerly.
"He's got a lump as big as an egg on the back of his head," declared Mr. Bill. "Looks to me as if somebody had blackjacked him!"
"That so?" Officer Clancy looked at the head whose black thatch was unlike any hair he had ever seen before. "There is a lump there! I expect that was it, Mrs. Gilfooly. Somebody slugged him, and he crawled up on your porch and fainted. And I bet I saw the guy that did it! I passed a queer-looking chap not ten minutes ago. He was dark like this fellow, and his hair was frizzed for fair, and he was in his bare feet. He was walking fast and looking straight ahead of him. I remember I thought he was a fine figure of fun. I never saw anybody just like him."