“Why, a poor old scarecrow, sir!” said Buck. “He only wants one or two old clothes put on him, and he’d make a fine tatter-dooley. Not much to be afraid of in him! Well, gentlemen, we have got him.”
“Yes, we have got him,” said Mark; “but it seems to me that the question is, what are we going to do with him now we have got him?”
“Yes,” said the doctor; “that is a bit of a puzzle. We can’t take him into camp. What do you say, Dean?”
The boy wrinkled up his forehead as he gazed down at the curious, weirdly thin object at their feet, who lay there looking like a re-animated mummy, gazing feebly up at his captors, his dull eyes gleaming faintly through the nearly closed lids as if suffering from the broad light of day, before they were tightly shut, as the wretched creature, who seemed hardly to exist, sank back into a stupor that looked like the precursor of his final sleep.
“Well, Dean, what have you got to propose?” said Mark. “Nothing. But if he’s coming into camp along with us I am going to camp out.”
“It’s a rum ’un,” grumbled Buck. “My word, he must be an old ’un!”
“Yes,” said the doctor; “of a great age.”
“And he is a man, sir?”
“Oh, yes, and he must have been a fine man in his time—six feet three or four, I should say.”
“Yes, sir,” said Buck, “and that’s the pity of it.”