“’Bout the boy you want to know, eh?” he asked in broken English. “I tell you all I know—but it is not very much.”
“Yes?” pleaded Dorothy in an agony of impatience. She had yet to learn that the Italian could not be hurried in his broken speech and that interruption only impeded his naturally slow progress.
“He seem strange to me, dat boy,” he continued, squinting his eyes in a dreamy fashion. “He did not act like a boy his age should act——”
“What was he like—this boy?” interrupted Dorothy again.
Her informant regarded her in pained surprise and, after some difficulty and more interpretation by his young countryman, he made out the meaning of her question.
Then, in his maddeningly deliberate way, he described the lad who had caught his interest—described him down to the very suit of clothes he had been wearing. Dorothy’s excitement and impatience increased almost past bearing as she realized that this lad could have been none other than her beloved runaway brother.
“Don’t hurry him, Doro,” whispered Tavia in her ear, as excited as Dorothy herself. “Can’t you see it only confuses him? Let him tell it his own way.”
Dorothy nodded and leaned eagerly across the counter toward her informant.
“Did he—did you—speak to this boy?”
The face of the man lit up and he nodded eagerly.