There, stretched at their full length in two of the large lounging chairs in the spacious living room at the front of the house, toasting their toes before the roaring fire, were two tramps!
The position of the two boys, Frank and Lanky, was a poor one, because the tramps were facing them. Therefore, the boys slipped around to another window, in order that they might not be so easily seen.
“I guess this is pretty soft,” one of the tramps was saying to the other.
“Yes, you’re right, Blinky, pretty soft. And there’s enough stuff in the kitchen to run us some time, too.”
Frank and Lanky looked at each other, smiling.
“Wonder who is the guy that owns this shack, Snadder,” said the first tramp. “Let’s get another drink.”
With this the two tramps got out of their chairs, showing a bit more alacrity than their comfort would seem to have justified.
One of them, the one addressed as Snadder, was a tall, very thin man, so tall that he stooped at the waist and a little more at the shoulders, as if constantly bending down to hear some one smaller than himself. The side view of his face showed him to have a long, beak nose and a growth of beard which might have been a week old.
The other was almost his opposite. As he staggered rather than walked toward the dining room, the two boys saw a low-sized man, very fat, with a pudgy round face and a nose that fitted perfectly with the general rotundity, and, as he turned to look back at Snadder, for he was leading the way, they saw that his eyelids squinted down very closely and that a moustache adorned his upper lip, looking like the stub end of a broom.
Lanky and Frank slipped along the side of the house toward the dining room to watch the next act in the performance.