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He was back again three nights afterward, and he come right out to the barn without going nigh the house. He had another feller with him, a kind of shabby dressed Italian man with curly hair.

“Fellers,” he says to me and Jonadab, “this is my friend, Mr. Macaroni; he’s going to engineer the barber shop for a while.”

Well, we’d just let our other barber go, so we didn’t think anything of this, but when he said that his friend Spaghetti was going to stay in the barn for a day or so, and that we needn’t mention that he was there, we thought 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 and started to say something about an outrage.

“Oh, that’s all right, your majesty,” says Brown. “Hi, Chianti, come here a minute! Here’s your old college chum, the count, been and put his foot in it.”

When the new barber showed up the count never made another move, just wilted like a morning-glory after sunrise. But you never see a worse upset man than Ebenezer Dillaway.

“But what does this mean?” says he, kind of wild like. “Why don’t you take that thing off his foot?”