At last the three hangmen arose to depart. They had frightened the poor boy out of his boots, and now, well-satisfied with their work, were going home to sleep the sleep of the just and beneficent whilst he was doomed to a shivery night in which the gallows they had erected for him was to stand out as if it were real and not a thing of the imagination.
“And, now, Oliver,” said Mr. Sikes consolingly, “you needn’t be afraid of the fortune coming true, because we’re going to see that it don’t. We’re going to watch over you, and tend you, and guide you, and some day we’ll all sit around and laugh ourselves sick over what that infernal lying gypsy woman said. So don’t you worry. Me and your Uncle Silas and Mr. Sage here are going to make it our business to see that you grow up to be a fine, decent, absolutely model young man, and ’long about 1920 or thereabouts we’ll have the doggonedest celebration you ever heard of. We’ll paint the town—”
“How old will I be then?” piped up Oliver wistfully.
“You’ll be thirty and over,” announced Mr. Sikes.
“And how old will you and Uncle Silas be?”
“About the same age as your Pa—couple of years’ difference, maybe, one way or the other.”
“How old will that be?”
Mr. Link, who was quick at figures, replied, but with a most singular hush in his usually jovial voice.
“Why—er—I’ll be seventy-eight, your Pa will be seventy-five, and your Uncle Joe here will be—you’ll be eighty, Joe. By jiminy, I wonder if—”
“I didn’t know anybody ever lived to be as old as that,” said Oliver, so earnestly that three of his listeners frowned. “Except Methusalum. Maybe you’ll all be dead and buried ’fore I’m thirty so what’s going to become of me then?”