I led him down to the court, where I'd laid out the plated tinware to dry.
"Think you can fit yourself into some of that boiler plate?" says I.
That hit the Boss in the short ribs. We tackled the job off-hand, me strappin' a section on him, and he clampin' another on me. It was like dressing for a masquerade in the dark, neither of us ever having worn steel boots or Harveyized vests before. Some of the joints didn't seem to fit any too close, and a lot of it I suppose we got on hindside front and upside down, but in the course of half an hour we were harnessed for fair, including a conning tower apiece on our heads. Then we did the march past just to see how we looked.
"With a little white muslin you'd do to go on as the ghost in 'Hamlet,'" says the Boss, through his front bars.
"You sound like a junk wagon comin' down the street," says I, "and you're a fair imitation of a tinshop on parade. Shall we go for a midnight stroll?"
"I'm ready," says the Boss.
Grabbing up a couple of two-handed skull splitters that I'd laid out to finish our costumes, we swung open the gate and sasshayed out, calm and dignified, into the middle of that bunch of brigands.
It wasn't hardly a square deal, of course, they being brought up on a steady diet of ghost stories; and I reckon there was a spooky look about us that sent a frappé wireless up and down those dago spines. But, after all, it was the banana oil the aluminum paint was mixed with that turned the trick. Smelled it, haven't you? If there's any perfume fitter for a lost soul than attar of banana oil, it hasn't been discovered. First they went bug-eyed. Next they sniffed. At the second sniff one big duffer, with rings in his ears and a fine assortment of second-hand pepper-boxes in his sash, digs up a scared yell that would have done credit to one of these Wuxtre-e-e! Wuxtre-e-e! boys, and then he skiddoos into the rocks like some one had tied a can to him. That set 'em all off, same's when you light the green cracker at the end of the bunch. Some yelled, some groaned, and some made no remarks. But they faded. Inside of two minutes by the clock we had the front yard to ourselves.
"Curtain!" says I to the Boss. "This is where we do a little disappearing ourselves, before they get curious and come back."
We hustled into the castle, pried ourselves out of our tin roofing, chucked our dunnage into old Blue Beak's best carryall, hitched a couple of auction-house steppers, and lit out on the town trail without so much as stopping to shake a da-da to old Vincenzo.