The vagabond would not relent. The auction's host summoned a nearby policeman who took the unsteady vagabond away. Thomas was visibly shaken by the event. It wasn't until he and his wife returned to their home on a hill overlooking the town that he finally felt calm. The next morning he read in the local newspaper about a madman without any identification who had been apprehended while molesting a passerby at an auction in the town. Surely the vagabond was a madman, he thought.