“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.