“Middling,” said Mr. Baxter reproachfully. “I was counting on sleeping in a nice, warm, soft bed to-night, Horace.”
His host pondered. “I was just thinking that maybe I could bring down a mattress from the attic, Ollie, and fix you up in the hall just outside my bedroom door. I’ll leave the door open. Plenty of blankets and—”
“All right, all right,” broke in Mr. Baxter, and gulped down some of the hot coffee. “I want to get an early start to-morrow morning, so you don’t need to mind about giving me a breakfast. We figure on getting away a little after sunrise.”
His host remonstrated. “I won’t listen to it,” he said. “You will go over to Rumley with me in my car just as soon as we’ve had breakfast. Your friends—I mean the gypsies—can follow along later. Not another word, old boy. I insist on it. You will want to see your son as soon as possible. I have to go to Rumley in the morning anyway.” He hesitated a moment, eyeing his guest keenly, and then proceeded: “Although I guess it won’t be necessary for me to look at that—Ahem! Ah—er—I was just wondering whose body it is, since it can’t possibly be yours. The one they found in the swamp yesterday, I mean.”
Mr. Baxter checked a yawn to inquire with sudden interest: “In the swamp, eh? Out in one of the pools? Well, by ginger!” He started up from his chair in a state of great excitement. “Why, it must be Tom Sharp’s body. Of all the—”
“Tom Sharp? Who is Tom Sharp? Besides, it isn’t a body. It’s a skeleton, so they say—with its head split open.”
“Tom Sharp,” declared Mr. Baxter with conviction. “Old Wattles told me all about it. Tom Sharp was killed with an ax right out there on the edge of the swamp thirty years ago. Same night the queen came to my house. He—”
“Can’t be,” broke in Mr. Gooch. “The doctors say this fellow has been dead only a year or so.”
“How does anybody know how long a skeleton has been dead?” demanded Mr. Baxter severely. “Of course it’s Tom Sharp. He got smashed over the head with an ax that night by another gypsy whose wife he had run away with. The husband caught up with him at Rumley, after chasing him for months. It’s against the gypsy law for a man to steal another man’s wife. So they never said anything about the killing. Just took Tom Sharp out in the swamp and—er—sort of left him. The fellow that killed him joined the band and went back to living with his wife, who was a girl named Magda. Maybe you recollect her. She was up to my house that night. Her husband died five or six years ago. His widow—Say, Horace, if they think that body is mine, who is supposed to have killed me?”
Mr. Gooch experienced a strange and unsuspected softening of the heart.