Brant dimly remembered that there was a Rapelyea Street, through which he sometimes passed on his way to the railroad station, and he had some faint memory of a gaudily painted shanty decked out with the signs of the zodiac in gilt papier maché.
“My orfice got a-fire this evening,” explained Zozo, “from the bakery next door. And I had to light out over the back fence. Them people in that neighborhood is kinder superstitious. They ain’t no idea of astrology. They don’t know it’s a Science. They think it’s some kind of magic. And if they’s to see me drove out by a common, ordinary fire, they’d think I was no sort of an astrologer. So I lit out quiet.”
His teeth chattered so that he made ten syllables out of “quiet.”
“They don’t understand the Science of it,” he continued, “and the fire got at my street clo’es before I knew it, and so I had to light out mighty quick. Now, jes’ lemme get home, will you? This here flannel ain’t no fur coat.”
Brant’s coat came off his shoulders in an instant.
“Put this on,” he said. “Confound you!—” as the man resisted,—“put it on!”
The astrologer slipped into the coat with a gasp of relief.
“Cracky!” he cried, “but I was freezin’!”
“Do you live far from here?” Brant inquired.
“Just a bit up the road. I’m ’most home, now,” replied Zozo, still chattering as to his teeth.