“You can search me. It’s almighty queer business to happen on my peaceful farm in the State o’ Maine.”
“Let the poor beggar rest here till morning and then we will consider him some more. I guess we don’t want to turn him over to the constable, Johnny.”
“Not till we try our hand at translatin’ him. I wish I had a Chinese dictionary. Say, Cap’n Mike, you’re as welcome as the flowers in spring, but as soon as you set foot on my farm things begin to happen. Trouble is a step-brother of yours. It’s like harborin’ a stormy petrel.”
“’Tis not fair to blackguard me,” laughed O’Shea. “You and your neighbors can sleep easy in your beds for I have caught the bogie-man.”
“I wish I knew what it is you’ve caught,” sighed the engineer.
O’Shea bent over the sleeping man in order to raise his head and slip underneath it a rolled blanket to serve as a pillow. His fingers chanced to detect on the top of the skull a curious depression or groove over which the red hair was rumpled in a sort of cow-lick. Examination convinced him that this was the result of some violent blow which had fairly dented the bony structure and pressed it down upon the brain.
“That is where he got it,” said O’Shea. “And ’tis what made a lunatic of him.”
“It looks like they tried to kill him with an axe but he was too tough for ’em, Cap’n Mike. No wonder that crack you gave him over the ear didn’t bother him much.”
“And whoever it was that put their mark on his back was the same party who caved in his lid or I’m a liar,” was the conclusion of Michael O’Shea.