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When Sampey visited the museum next day, he was eyed with considerable curiosity by the freaks. Castellani asked him directly what Bat meant by his stories. Sampey had expected this question, and was ready for it. After binding the showman to everlasting secrecy, he said: "I have made a great discovery, but it is impossible for me to go into all its details.
Muggie, these dreams indicate your destiny. You should marry none but a hero, and when he comes you will know him by his amber eyes." With this Sampey sighed, for Muggie was looking earnestly into his gray eyes. Had he thus, in blind self-sacrifice to the whim of a foolish girl, cast himself into a pit? If so, what meant his light step and cheerful smile as soon as she was out of sight?
Sampey, the gentle, usually dove-eyed, was now transformed. Those were not the accustomed gray eyes with which Bat was familiar, nor yet the limpid, amber eyes which had set poor Zoë's heart bounding; Sampey gazed upon his victim with eyes that were a fierce and insurrectionary scarlet! Bat, contumelious now no longer, dashed wildly away. He spread his wonderful tale.
Being a shrewd business man, he presently recovered his composure, and then in the most indifferent manner remarked that a person who could change the color of his eyes at will ought to be able, perhaps, if he should get started right, to make a little money, possibly, out of the accomplishment; and then he offered Sampey forty dollars a week to pose as a freak in the Great Oriental Dime Museum.
The two men were alone, Bat furious and desperate with jealousy; Sampey fearful, but determined; brutality against wit, strength against cunning, fury against patience, a bulldog matched with a mink, a game-cock pitted against an owl. Sampey pretended to have dropped something accidentally. He stooped to pick it up, and some seconds elapsed before he pretended to have found it.
"I maka mine eye changa colah, lika da scounda Samp." With that he dipped the brush into the vial and applied it to his eyes. Then he picked up two of the curious little glass cups, and slipped them, one at a time, over his eyeballs and under his eyelids, where they fitted snugly. They were artificial eyes which Sampey had had made to cover his natural eyeballs on occasion.
That made him arrogant and presumptuous. He, too, loved Zoë. Thus it came about that a rivalry was established between Sampey and the Wild Man of Milo. How was it with Zoë? Which loved she? or loved she either? Observing and reflecting, she dreamed. As it was eyes only that she saw, it was of eyes only that she dreamed.
Sampey, grown surprisingly bold and self-reliant, named his terms to Castellani a half-interest in the business and Castellani, swear and bully and bluster as he might, must accept. This made Sampey a rich man at once.
Yet what shock there was next day, when the hero of her dreams came to her with his ordinary pale-gray eyes, blurred somewhat and inclined to humidity! "Sampey!" she exclaimed in dismay, tumbled thus rudely from the clouds. "Muggie!" "Your eyes last night then you were a hero; but to-day " "A hero!" innocently echoed Sampey. "Why, yes!
"Well," he remarked, contemptuously, drawing Zoë closer and holding her with a tender solicitude "well, what of it?" His insolence enraged Hoolagaloo. "H hwat of eet! Santa Maria! Da scound! Ha, ha! Da gal no marry you now!" Sampey deliberately moved Zoë so that he might reach his watch, and after looking calmly at it a moment he said: "Muggie and I have been married just thirty hours."
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