the corner of the piazza, a figure
discernible in the light shed by the front door.

"Oh, come here," said Crane.

The figure betrayed no sign of having heard, unless a slight
accentuation in its limp might be so interpreted.

"What's your name?" shouted Burton.

The old man looked up.

"Yes, yes," he said, in a high shaking voice, "I'm lame; you're right
there, sir. I've been lame these twenty years, and carrying down all
them trunks has put sich a crick in my back as never was."

"I asked you your name," repeated his employer.

"When I came? Why, this afternoon, sir. It was your butler engaged me. I
worked at the hotel here once, and Mr. Smithfield he come to my wife and
says, 'Susan,' he says, he knowing her since he was a little boy--"

"Let me look at you," said Crane sternly.

But the elderly man, still talking to himself, retreated into the
shadow.

And then Tucker was surprised to hear his host exclaim with violence:

"By Jove, the young devil," and to see him hurl himself off the piazza
at its highest point. He would have landed actually on top of his
decrepit servitor, had not the old man developed an activity utterly
unsuspected by Tucker, which enabled him to get away down the avenue
with a speed that Crane could not surpass.

"Well, well, what are we coming to?" Tucker murmured as he watched them
dodge and double around trees and bushes. Presently they passed out of
the light from the house, and only the sound of their feet beating on
the hard avenue indicated that the fugitive had taken to the open.

Solon was still peering nervously into the dark when at last his host
returned. Crane was breathing hard, and held in his hand a small furry
object that Tucker made out gradually to be a neat gray wig.

"Oh," said Burton, still panting and slapping his side, "I haven't run
so hard since I was in college. But I should have got him if it hadn't
been for his superior knowledge of the ground."

"My dear Burton," said Tucker crossly, "what in the world have you been
doing?"

"What have I been doing? I've been trying to catch that wretched boy,
Brindlebury, but it's as well I didn't, I dare say. I thought his limp a
little spectacular this afternoon when the trunks were being carried
down. But his deafness--the young fool!--that deafness, never found
anywhere but on the comic stage, was too much for me. He runs fast, I'll
say that for him. He led me through a bramble hedge; backed through,
himse