“Yes, and then?” asked Natale breathlessly.
“When he came back, he saw his coat on the ground, and he knew he had hung it up. ‘How comes my coat on the ground?’ he said, very loud indeed, and your mamá told him he must have put it there himself. But he did not hear her, because he was shaking the coat and feeling in the pocket,—but there was nothing there!
“We made a great fuss about it,” Olga ended, shrugging her shoulders and throwing up her hands, “but what was the use?”
Natale was silent with dismay. A hundred francs meant so much. It was all that they had made during the ten days’ stay at Cutigliano, and now it was gone, in a moment.
“The stable man?” he questioned in a distressed tone of voice, and very low.
“No, Giovanni said it could not have been the signor. He is a rich man and honest, everybody says.”
So subdued were they all over the trouble of the afternoon that not even Elvira thought it worth while to scold the quiet boy who presently slipped in among the little crowd of players in the tent, deep in fruitless discussion over their grievous loss. They had had a crowded tent that afternoon, and the receipts had been so good that this evening would have been one of rejoicing if only the money for the labors of the ten other days and nights had been again safe in Giovanni’s pocket. There was not the slightest clew to the thief, as no stranger had been known to enter the tent, and Giovanni had even interviewed the Signor Barbera from outside the doorway. It had been necessary to be on the lookout for possible thieving, as the field was crowded all the afternoon with strange peasants, attracted by the band music and the big yellow tent, and by peddlers with their wares. One very decent-looking peddler had begged pretty, vain Arduina to look at his beautiful jewelry and ribbons, but she had refused him entrance very reluctantly, and Giovanni himself had noticed how patiently and decorously the man had turned away. He had worn a red fez cap over his long black hair, and his bushy black beard had reached nearly to his waist.
“I saw him!” Emilio, one of the musicians exclaimed, “and his legs were as crooked as Pietro’s, only they bent out at the knee instead of in!” There was a laugh at this sally, but Pietro frowned and muttered something about Emilio’s having little right to criticize the legs of others.
“I met such a man as I came out of the church in the crowd,” said Nonna, hastening to speak that a dispute might be avoided. “He walked very well notwithstanding his poor, bent legs, and he asked me if he were too late to get a glimpse of the blessed relics. A politer man I never saw, though Tito was afraid of him, and began to cry when the man snapped his fingers at him.”
Poor Natale felt so left out in the cold with this talk that he could not bear it long, and was just about to creep away, down to his corner in the wagon, when a strange hand lifted a corner of the tent flap, and a strange voice inquired for “Il piccolo Natale.”