Notwithstanding this and other diverting passages, Master Oliver was finally made to realize the vastness of the dark and terrifying shadow that hung over him. He listened to the pronouncement of his own doom, and his warm little heart was beating fast and hard in an ice-cold body that trembled with awe. He suffered his “uncles” to pat him on the shoulder and say they would “stand by” him through thick and thin, and his lip quivered with something far removed from gratitude. He sat up long past his bed-time, and his eyes were bright and shining where ordinarily they would have been dull and heavy. At last the three hangmen arose to depart. They had frightened the poor boy out of his boots, and now, well-satisfied with their work, were going home to sleep the sleep of the just and beneficent whilst he was doomed to a shivery night in which the gallows they had erected for him was to stand out as if it were real and not a thing of the imagination. “And, now, Oliver,” said Mr. Sikes consolingly, “you needn’t be afraid of the fortune coming true, because we’re going to see that it don’t. We’re going to watch over you, and tend you, and guide you, and some day we’ll all sit around and laugh ourselves sick over what that infernal lying gypsy woman said. So don’t you worry. Me and your Uncle Silas and Mr. Sage here are going to make it our business to see that you grow up to be a fine, decent, absolutely model young man, and ’long about 1920 or thereabouts we’ll have the doggonedest celebration you ever heard of. We’ll paint the town—” “How old will I be then?” piped up Oliver wistfully. “You’ll be thirty and over,” announced Mr. Sikes. “And how old will you and Uncle Silas be?” “About the same age as your Pa—couple of years’ difference, maybe, one way or the other.” “How old will that be?” Mr. Link, who was quick at figures, replied, but with a most singular hush in his usually jovial voice. “Why—er—I’ll be seventy-eight, your Pa will be seventy-five, and your Uncle Joe here will be—you’ll be eighty, Joe. By jiminy, I wonder if—” “I didn’t know anybody ever lived to be as old as that,” said Oliver, so earnestly that three of his listeners frowned. “Except Methusalum. Maybe you’ll all be dead and buried ’fore I’m thirty so what’s going to become of me then?” “Why—er—we don’t intend to be dead for a long, long time,” explained Mr. Sikes. “I’m figuring on living to be a hundred, and so’s your pa and Uncle Silas. Don’t you worry about us, sonny. We’ll be hanging—I mean, we’ll be moseying around this here town for forty or fifty years longer, sure as you’re alive. Yes, sirree.” “What an awful thing it would be,” groaned Oliver’s father, “if all three of us was to up and die inside the next eight or ten—” “If there’s an epidemic like that,” interrupted Mr. Link, scowling at the tactless Mr. Baxter, “it’ll probably take Oliver off too, so don’t be foolish.”