hought that was funny.

But Peter done a lot of funny things the next day. One of 'em was to set
a feller painting a side of the house by the count's window, that didn't
need painting at all. And when the feller quit for the night, Brown told
him to leave the ladder where 'twas.

That evening the same crowd was together in the setting room. Peter was
as lively as a cricket, talking, talking, all the time. By and by he
says:

"Oh, say, I want you to see the new barber. He can shave anything from
a note to a porkypine. Come in here, Chianti!" he says, opening the door
and calling out. "I want you."

And in come the new Italian man, smiling and bowing and looking "meek
and lowly, sick and sore," as the song says.

Well, we laughed at Brown's talk and asked the Italian all kinds of fool
questions and nobody noticed that the count wan't saying nothing. Pretty
soon he gets up and says he guesses he'll go to his room, 'cause he
feels sort of sick.

And I tell you he looked sick. He was yellower than he was the other
night, and he walked like he hadn't got his sea legs on. Old Dillaway
was terrible sorry and kept asking if there wan't something he could do,
but the count put him off and went out.

"Now that's too bad!" says Brown. "Spaghetti, you needn't wait any
longer."

So the other Italian went out, too.

And then Peter T. Brown turned loose and talked the way he done when
me and Jonadab first met him. He just spread himself. He told of this
bargain that he'd made and that sharp trade he had turned, while we set
there and listened and laughed like a parsel of fools. And every time
that Ebenezer'd get up to go to bed, Peter'd trot out a new yarn and
he'd have to stop to listen to that. And it got to be eleven o'clock and
then twelve and then one.

It was just about quarter past one and we was laughing our heads off at
one of Brown's jokes, when out under the back window there was a jingle
and a thump and a kind of groaning and wiggling noise.

"What on earth is that?" says Dillaway.

"I shouldn't be surprised," says Peter, cool as a mack'rel on ice, "if
that was his royal highness, the count."

He took up the lamp and we all hurried outdoors and 'round the corner.
And there, sure enough, was the count, sprawling on the ground with his
leather satchel alongside of him, and his foot fast in a big steel trap
that was hitched by a chain to the lower round of the ladder. He rared
up on his hands when he see us an