“Oh, an easier vun? Den I haf it. See!” and he brought to light a big Turkish rocker, that was in the last stages of decay.
Meanwhile Sid and Phil had been strolling about, leaving Tom to engage Komsky in conversation. The two looked in many corners, and peered under heaps of furniture, but they did not see their chair. Nor, if the dealer had it, did he show any desire to produce it. Tom looked at rocker after rocker that was brought out, and at last, convinced that his method was likely to prove a failure, he boldly stated the case, and demanded to know, whether by mistake or otherwise, the dealer had taken their old relic.
The surprise of Mr. Komsky was pitiful to observe. He all but tore out his beard, and called upon his ancestors as far back as the sixteenth generation to witness that he had not even seen the chair. He was an honest man, he was a poor man, he was a man born to poverty and under an unlucky star, but never, never, never! not if you were to give him a million dollars, would he take a chair from a student’s room, without permission.
“For vy should I, ven I can buys dem efery day?” he demanded, with a pathetic gesture of his forward-thrust hands.
“Well, I guess it isn’t here,” spoke Tom, regretfully, when they had exhausted all the possibilities. “Yet you were at college to-day, Komsky.”
“Vy, sure I vos at der college to-day. Nearly efery veek I am there, ain’t it? Yet I have not your chair.”
It was evident that he was telling the truth. He did not have the chair then, though he might have had it, and have sold it to some other student, perhaps one from Boxer Hall or Fairview, for those lads also patronized the second-hand dealers, and Komsky was one of the largest.
“Cæsar’s grandmother!” cried Tom, in dismay, as this possibility suggested itself, “just suppose Langridge or some of those chaps had our chair! Say, maybe Langridge put up the game!”
“Hardly possible,” asserted Phil. “Come on, we’ll have a look in some of the other shops, then we’ll get grub and hurry back. I think I saw drops of blood in Zane’s eye.”
“He sure would like to get our names down in his little book,” said Sid.