Alfred felt certain that his father had entered into some sort of an arrangement with the professor. He felt certain the panorama man was endeavoring to induce his father to invest money in the panorama and he finally resolved that it should not be.
The more he thought the matter over, the more distasteful show life appeared to him.
Then the illusion came back to him. He had dreamed by night and prayed by day; he had lived for years with the wish, the hope that he might, after a few years of show life, earn enough to gratify his life's desires, to possess a farm, to own fine horses, to plant fields, to reap harvests, to live near nature.
He figured over several sheets of white paper. He would be compelled to labor forty years in the tannery to acquire sufficient money to buy a farm and nearly one hundred years in the newspaper office.
Jimmy Reynolds, the clown with Thayer & Noyse Circus, received one hundred dollars a week, board and lodging, so Alfred had been informed. Alfred felt in the innermost depths of his soul that he was a much better clown than Jimmy. He would secure the position now held by Reynolds—one hundred dollars each week for thirty weeks, three thousand dollars a year; ten years, thirty thousand dollars. Ten years a clown, then a farm. Show business was improper for the father but the means to attain the end for the son, as he reasoned.
When Lin found the figures and writing on the many sheets of scribbling paper in his room, she pondered long and confusedly over them.
"What in the world hes thet consarned boy got intu his punkin' agin? Thirty years a clown, ninety-nine years in a nusepaper, furty years in the tan-yard, and a farmer all the rest uf my life." Then she laughed. "He must think he'll be as ole as Methusulus got." She carried the paper to the mother.
They confronted Alfred with the sheets on which were scribbled the hieroglyphics. Alfred laughingly said it was a new way to tell fortunes.
Alfred decided to talk to the father the first opportunity that offered. Father and son were seated in the front room. "Father"—Alfred rarely addressed the parent as "father;" "Pap" was the every-day appellation but the present matter was of greater importance—"Father, I would like to talk to you privately and want you to answer me truthfully."
The father had his feet on a stool reclining in the big, easy chair. At the words "answer me truthfully," the father's feet fell to the floor, his cigar dropped until it lay on his chinbeard; the man looked at the boy to convince himself he had heard aright.