“I advise that you remain with Mr. Starleigh for several weeks yet, and then we will start you out. You may take your own time in getting over the ground, and whenever you need money you can send to the paymaster for it. When you have finished, the bill will be promptly paid, and I trust by that time you will have other work, sufficient to keep you going. Do you accept?”
Bob did, without hesitation.
CHAPTER XV
BOB BECOMES A TRAVELLING PHOTOGRAPHER
Bob did not know if he was walking on stone or the air when he left the Maverick mansion. To him it seemed as if the vista of good fortune had opened to its very widest limit.
“I must be dreaming,” he murmured. “Bet a cent I wake up in the loft of old Carrow’s barn and find it all a dream.”
And the youth actually pinched himself to make sure that he was not asleep.
It was past eleven o’clock, but though Bob might have taken a horse-car to his boarding-house, he preferred to walk, knowing full well that even when he came to lie down, he would not be able to sleep for speculating over all that had happened.
The night was a gloomy one, and presently, without hardly any warning, it began to rain. At first the drops were few and far between, but before the youth had gone a block farther the shower turned into a deluge, and Bob scampered for shelter.
Not far away was a shed over the front of a butcher shop. Under this shed ran Bob, and huddled close to the building to avoid the rain which the rising wind drove in.
Bob had been under the shed probably three minutes when a man and a woman came out of the hall-way beside the butcher shop, and stood watching the rain.