“But Nita may have told him about you and me!” Sally cried. “Oh, David, don’t bother about me! Take your chance while you have it to be cleared of those terrible charges! I—I’ll go back to the Home and—and wait for you. I could stand it—somehow—if I knew you were back in college, a—a hero, and working for both of us. Please, David! Think of yourself, not me!”
“No.” David shook his head stubbornly. “This little thing I’ve done wouldn’t get you out of trouble. They might clap you into the reformatory, as a juvenile delinquent. We can’t take a chance on that! Besides, you’ve had enough of the orphanage. We stick together, darling, and that’s that! May I have another cup of coffee, if it isn’t too much trouble?”
“You’re both a pair of fools, so crazy in love with each other that you can’t see straight!” Mrs. Bybee scolded, as she blew her nose violently. “But I’d like to see Winfield Bybee try to do anything you don’t want him to! Far as I’m concerned, you can have anything I’ve got and welcome to it!”
Of course there was nothing then for Pop Bybee to do but to adopt David’s plan. The boy was transferred to a lower berth, where he was safely hidden until after the detectives had arrived and departed with Pop Bybee, Eddie and Gus, the barker.
Eddie, in his zeal for playing his part well, had torn his shirt, bruised his knuckles, scraped dirt on his arms, rolled in mud, and done everything else to make up for the part.
For the rest of the day Eddie strutted about in the limelight of publicity. Newspaper photographers and reporters arrived within a few minutes after the detectives had phoned headquarters that the suitcases filled with silver and bills had been found in the hayloft; and when Eddie returned with the showman and the barker, he was prevailed upon to pose bashfully for his pictures.
The newspaper reporters commented admirably on the “boy hero’s” admirable modesty and diffidence in the big front-page stories that they wrote about the carnival robbery, and Eddie’s freckled face, grinning bashfully from the center of the pages, confirmed every word written about him.
His kewpie doll booth at the carnival that afternoon and evening was mobbed by his admirers, and before the day was ended Eddie almost believed that he had routed two famous criminals and saved a small fortune for his employer.
Sally was permitted to stay with David during the afternoon, but Bybee apologetically asked her to go on for the evening performances, since a record-breaking crowd had turned out, drawn partly by the fine weather that followed the storm, but largely by the front page publicity which the robbery had won for the show.