It is the same figure; the same rags and tinsel and dirt; the same disfigured face, with its black patch and its fringe of frowzy hair; the same, yet worse to look upon; for now the under jaw is dropped, the mouth drivels, the eye not concealed by the patch leers stupidly.
Unmistakably, it is the face of an idiot.
“How!” ejaculates this being, peering curiously at the three. “How do? Where ye goin’?”
Van Vernet gazes curiously for a moment, then utters a sound expressive of satisfaction. He has heard of a fool that inhabits these alleys; Stanhope has mentioned him on one or two occasions. “A modernized Barnaby Rudge,” Stanhope had called him. Surely this must be him.
Turning to one of his men he says, in an undertone:
“If I’m not mistaken this fellow is a fool who grew up in these slums, and knows them by heart. ‘Silly Charlie,’ I think, they call him. I believe we can make him useful.”
Then turning to the intruder he says suavely:
“How are you, my man? How are you?”
But a change has come over the mood of the seeming idiot. Striking his breast majestically, and pointing to a huge tin star which decorates it, he waves his hand toward them, and says with absurd dignity:
“G’way—g’way! Charlie big p’liceman. Gittin’ late; g’way.”