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“And who”–the landlord addressed high Heaven with a gesture at once pious and pessimistic–“is to pay me fourteen dollars back rent this dirty beggar owes?”

“The man,” said Stepfather Time gently, “is dead.”

“He is.” The landlord confirmed the unwelcome fact with objurgations. “Now must come the po-liss, the coroner, trouble, and expense. And what have I who run my property honest and respectable got to pay for it? Some rags and a bum clock.”

Willy Woolly sniffed at one protruding foot and growled. Dead or alive, this was not Willy Woolly’s kind of man. “Now, now, Willy Woolly!” reproved his master. “Who are we that we should judge him?”

“But I don’t like him,” declared Willy Woolly in unequivocal dog language.

“I think from his face that he has suffered much,” said the gentle collector, wise in human pain.

“Me; I suppose I don’t suffer!” pointed out the landlord vehemently. “Fourteen dollars out. Two months’ rent. A bum clock.”

He kicked the shabby case which whizzed and birred and struck five. The voice of its bell, measured and mellow and pure, was unquestionably D in alt.

“My dear sir,” said Stepfather Time urbanely, but quivering underneath his calm manner with the hot eagerness of the chase, “I will buy your clock.”

A gust of rough laughter passed through the crowd. The injurious word “nut” floated in the air, and was followed by “Verrichter.” The landlord took thought and hope.

“It is a very fine clock,” he declared.

“It is a bum clock,” Stepfather Time reminded him mildly.

“Stepnadel, the auctioneer, would pay me much money for it.”

“I will pay you much money for it.”

“How much?”

“Seven dollars. That is one month’s rent that he owed.”

“Two months’ rent I must have.”

“One,” said Stepfather Time firmly.

“Two,” said the landlord insistently.

“Urff! Grr–rr–rr–rrff!” said Willy Woolly in emphatic dissuasion.

Stepfather Time was scandalized. Expert opinion was quite outside of Willy Woolly’s province. Only once in the course of their years together had he interfered in a purchase. Justice compelled Stepfather Time to recall that the subject of Willy’s protests on that occasion had subsequently turned out to be far less antique than the worm holes in the woodwork (artificially blown in with powder) would have led the unsuspecting to suppose. But about the present legacy there could be no such question. It was genuine. It was old. It was valuable. It possessed a seraphic note pitched true to the long-desired chord.

Extracting a ten-dollar note from his wallet, Stepfather Time waved it beneath the landlord’s wrinkled and covetous nose. The landlord capitulated. Willy Woolly, sniffing at the clock with fur abristle, lifted up his voice and wailed. Perhaps his delicate nose had already detected the faint, unhallowed odor of the chemicals within. He stubbornly refused to ride back in the cart with the new acquisition, and was accused of being sulky and childish.

* * * * *

The relic of the late unlamented Lukisch was temporarily installed in a high chair before the open window giving on the areaway of Number 37. There it briefly beamed upon the busy life of Our Square with its bland and hypocritical face, and there, thrice and no more, it sounded the passing of the hours with its sweet and false voice, biding the stroke of nine. Meantime Willy Woolly settled down to keep watch on it and could not be moved from that duty. Every time it struck the half he growled. At the hour he barked and raged. When Stepfather Time sought to draw him away to dinner he committed the unpardonable sin of dog-dom, he snarled at his master. Turning this strange manifestation over in his troubled mind, the collector decided that Willy Woolly must be ill, and therefore that evening went to seek the Little Red Doctor and his wisdom.

Together they came across the park space opposite the House of Silvery Voices in time to witness the final scene.