“Don’t know. He told Doc. Sharpless he fell somehow. Doc. says he’d got a bad bump.”
The old fellow looked at Bat as though he expected him to say something. But the big man examined the wrapper of his cigar in silence.
“I’d never knowed who the fellow was,” said the man with the basket, “only my brother was along. He told me.”
Still Bat was silent, and the greater grew the old chap’s disappointment.
“We reckoned you’d like to hear about him,” resumed he. “Of course we thought he must be a friend of yours.”
“Entire stranger,” replied Bat, briefly.
“Funny, aint it, how he should come asking after you like that, and you not know him? And then to find him unconscious in the road out by the castle, too. We thought that was very queer.”
It occurred to Scanlon that the tone of the old man’s remarks was not desirable. So he attempted to shift it about.
“When a person feels that he must fall,” remarked Bat, “he should be very careful in the selection of a place to fall in. Now the middle of a roadway as a site shows carelessness don’t you think?”
But the ancient refused to be side-tracked. He clung to his theme like a terrier.