They turned to Jane Sage for comfort, and while that young lady smilingly called them a couple of “dear old geese” it was so much more poetic than Mrs. Grimes’s “idiotic old jackasses” that they forthwith accepted her as an ally and from that time on went to her with all their troubles—dubiously and shamefacedly at first, to be sure, but with a confidence that soon developed into arrogant assurance. She confided to Oliver October that they nearly bothered the life out of her, and begged him, for her sake, to smile more frequently than he did—(Mr. Sikes dwelt mournfully upon what he called Oliver’s “hang-dog” expression)—and to stop haranguing the members of the common council about the defects in the city drainage system—(Mr. Link said that it wasn’t right, the way he lost his temper when discussing the conditions, and besides nobody else had ever found any fault with the sewers in Rumley); and never to so far forget himself as to again threaten to sue George Henley if he didn’t settle his account of four years’ standing; and by all means to refrain from arguing politics with Justice of the Peace Winterbottom, because neither Mr. Sikes nor Mr. Link slept very well after listening to these heated debates. “Poor old Janie,” Oliver would say, with his always engaging grin. “I’ll bet you wish I was safely past thirty.” “I do that,” she would always respond, very much as Biddy McGuire, the Irish washwoman, might have said it. CHAPTER XIII THE GOOD SAMARITAN PAYS The winter wore away, spring came and quickly melted into summer; the first anniversary of the unexplained disappearance of Oliver Baxter passed. Three months remained of the last year allotted to Oliver October by the gypsy “queen” on that wild, shrieking night in ’ninety. He was still alive and thriving, and the shadow of the scaffold was as invisible as on the day the prophecy was uttered. But by this time practically everybody in Rumley was counting the days and jokingly reminding Oliver that his chances got better every day! He grinned and suggested that the town ought to put up a stupendous calendar in front of the city hall and check off each succeeding day, so that the public could keep count with the least possible tax on the mind. “I feel like a freak in a dime museum,” he said to Jane one evening. “What you ought to do at the lawn fête next week, Jane, is to put me in a little tent and charge ten cents admission to see the man that the hangman is after. You’d raise enough money to wipe out the entire church debt. Think it over.” He had just returned from a hurried trip to Nashville, Tennessee, where an old man was being held—a queer old tramp with a prodigious Adam’s apple, who refused to give any account of himself. This was but one of the fruitless journeys he had taken during the twelve-month.