"Strangeways," he said. "That'd make a good-enough name for him. Let's
call him Mr. Strangeways. I don't like the way the fellows have of
calling him 'the Freak.'"

So the name had been adopted, and soon became an established fact.

"The way I feel about him," Tembarom said, "is that the fellow's not a
bit of a joke. What I see is that he's up against about the toughest
proposition I've ever known. Gee! that fellow's not crazy. He's worse.
If he was out-and-out dippy and didn't know it, he'd be all right.
Likely as not he'd be thinking he was the Pope of Rome or Anna Held.
What knocks him out is that he's just right enough to know he's wrong,
and to be trying to get back. He reminds me of one of those chaps the
papers tell about sometimes--fellows that go to work in livery-stables
for ten years and call themselves Bill Jones, and then wake up some
morning and remember they're some high-browed minister of the gospel
named the Rev. James Cadwallader."

When the curtain drew up on Tembarom's amazing drama, Strangeways had
been occupying his bed nearly three weeks, and he himself had been
sleeping on a cot Mrs. Bowse had put up for him in his room. The
Hutchinsons were on the point of sailing for England--steerage--on the
steamship Transatlantic, and Tembarom was secretly torn into
fragments, though he had done well with the page and he was daring to
believe that at the end of the month Galton would tell him he had
"made good" and the work would continue indefinitely.

If that happened, he would be raised to "twenty-five per" and would be
a man of means. If the Hutchinsons had not been going away, he would