“What-a you say?” he says, bending for'ards.
“Mr. Brown was mistaken, that's all,” says Dillaway; “he meant rapiers.”
“But why-a razors—why-a razors?” says the count.
Now I was watching Brown's face, and all at once I see it light up like you'd turned a searchlight on it. He settled back in his chair and fetched a long breath as if he was satisfied. Then he grinned and begged pardon and talked a blue streak for the rest of the evening.
Next day he was the happiest thing in sight, and when Miss Dillaway and the count went Lover's Nesting he didn't seem to care a bit. All of a sudden he told Jonadab and me that he was going up to Boston that evening on bus'ness and wouldn't be back for a day or so. He wouldn't tell what the bus'ness was, either, but just whistled and laughed and sung, “Good-by, Susannah; don't you grieve for me,” till train time.
He was back again three nights afterward, and he come right out to the barn without going nigh the house. He had another feller with him, a kind of shabby dressed Italian man with curly hair.
“Fellers,” he says to me and Jonadab, “this is my friend, Mr. Macaroni; he's going to engineer the barber shop for a while.”
Well, we'd just let our other barber go, so we didn't think anything of this, but when he said that his friend Spaghetti was going to stay in the barn for a day or so, and that we needn't mention that he was there, we thought that was funny.
But Peter done a lot of funny things the next day. One of 'em was to set a feller painting a side of the house by the count's window, that didn't need painting at all. And when the feller quit for the night, Brown told him to leave the ladder where 'twas.
That evening the same crowd was together in the setting room. Peter was as lively as a cricket, talking, talking, all the time. By and by he says: