"Well!" the Captain of the Guard muttered, as he clenched his fist over the lantern ring. "Get going!
I'm letting you off because I've no time to be bothered with a stupid old man like you.
Go on!"
The doctor had to obey.
The driver turned the carriage around.
It creaked and rattled, the horse snorted, the iron lanterns flashed for the last time, and the poor doctor started back to town...This was the last straw.
It was just too much for him. He burst into tears.
They had all been so rude to him, they had called him a stupid old man. But worst of all, he had lost the doll of Tutti the Heir!
"I suppose that means I've also lost my head," he thought and wept His spectacles became so clouded he couldn't see a thing.
He felt like burying his head in a pillow.
Meanwhile, the driver was racing his horse.
The doctor moaned for ten more minutes, and then his usual good sense returned.
"I can still find the doll. There were very few people about this evening.
And the roads here are always deserted.
Perhaps no one has passed by in all this time."
He told the driver to slow down and look at the ground carefully.
"Well?
Do you see anything?" he kept asking every minute.
"Can't see a thing.
No, nothing here," the driver replied.
And then he would tell him what he could see, things that were quite useless and of no interest.
"There's a barrel."
"No, that's not it."
"That looks like a good piece of glass."
"No."
"And a torn shoe."
"No," the doctor answered. His voice kept getting sadder.
The driver was really trying hard.
He looked every way.
He saw so well in the dark he might have been the captain of an ocean liner instead of a cab-driver.
"Still can't see the doll?
It has on a pink dress."
"No, there's no doll," the driver answered in a deep, sad voice.
"That means someone has found it.
There's no sense looking any more.
Here, this is where I fell asleep.
It was still sitting next to me then.
Oh, dear!"
And the doctor was ready to weep again.
The driver sniffled in sympathy.
"What do we do now?"
"I don't know.
I don't know at all." Doctor Caspar rested his head in his palms, swaying to and fro from grief and the bumps in the road. "I know!" he cried. "Why, of course! That's it.
Why didn't I think of it before!
The doll ran away.
I fell asleep, and it ran away.
Certainly.
She was alive.
I noticed that right away.
But that doesn't make me any less guilty so far as the Three Fat Men are concerned."