They dressed Nickie and took him up to the house and fed him, and then drove him back to Bullfrog in their spring cart, delivering him into the hands of Madame Marve, who manifested great joy on receiving back the unparalleled Missing Link in fairly good condition.

Nickie had explained to the settler that he believed the orang-outang that attacked him had escaped from Professor Thunder’s Museum of Marvels and that he intended claiming damages.

Later in the day Nickie and the Professor drove out and recovered Mahdi’s outfit from the hollow log, and that evening the Missing Link was again on view, and exciting much interest, although he sullenly refused to any further demonstration for the edification of the people of Bullfrog.

CHAPTER XIII.

The widow and the link.

The Museum of Marvels was “resting” at Devil’s Head.  The Professor was resting, personally and particularly, on a stretcher bed in a small, hot, fly-infested room in “The Devil’s Head” Hotel, pending the mending of divers injuries sustained in a disaster that put the show temporarily out of action.  Thunder did not travel with his own horses, finding it much cheaper to hire a team to pull his caravan from one pitch to another.  The pair of bays engaged to tow the museum, and traps and wares from Field Hill to Corner Stone had been so upset by the eccentric conduct of a frenzied inebriate, who fled along the stone road in a woman’s nightdress, being pursued by purely imaginary griffins, dodoes, unicorns and dragons, all in primary colours, that they wheeled and bolted with the whole caboodle, and running into a bridge railing upset Professor Thunder and Professor Thunder’s Museum of Marvels into Billy’s Creek, greatly to the detriment of the show, and to the serious discomfort of the Professor who was pulled from under Ammonia, the gorilla, just when that amusing animal had almost succeeded in stifling him in the slurry for which Billy’s Creek was famous.

While the Professor rested and underwent repairs, and whiled his time negotiating for damages with the owner of the horses and the frantic person in the woman’s nightdress, Matty Cann, the’ Living Skeleton, and Nicholas Crips, the Missing Link, were allowed their liberty.  The Living Skeleton went home to the bosom of his affectionate family, with stern instructions to carefully regulate his diet, and Nickie went on to Winyip, sworn to preserve professional secrets, and bound to hold himself in readiness for resumption of duties at a day’s notice.

Nickie wore a good suit of store clothes, he bore on his rascally head quite a reputable hat, his linen was fairly meritorious, his boots were above reproach, he wore socks like a man accustomed to luxuries, he was clean-shaven, he jingled money in his pocket.  In his varied career Nickie had had ups and downs; true, his “ups” had been brief, but they were frequent enough to keep him almost in touch with respectability.  At Winyip, a considerable township in its way, he passed quite easily for a dramatic artist taking rest and change to dissipate brain fag, the result of too studious application to his art.