"Your
mistake."
The two men faced each other, for Uncle Felix had risen to his feet.
The children held back and stared in silence. They were not quite sure
what it was they saw. On Judy's face alone was a radiant confidence.
For, in place of the bedraggled and unkempt figure that had crawled
beneath the sheet ten minutes before, there rose before them all
apparently a tall young stripling, clean and white and shining as a
fair Greek god. His hair was curly, he was dressed in gold, a silver
sword hung down beside him, and his beardless face and beauty in it
that made it radiant as a glad spring day. The sunlight was very
dazzling just at that moment.
"You said," continued Uncle Felix, in a voice of deadly quiet, "that
the man you wanted had a wig of hair and a beard--a false beard?"
The Policeman stared as though his eyes would drop out upon the
tarpaulin. But he said no word. He consulted his note-book in a dazed,
flustered kind of way. Then he looked up nervously at the astonishing
figure of the "Tramp." Then he looked back at his book again.
"And old?" said Uncle Felix.
"And old," repeated the officer thickly, poring over the page.
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