He had not yet forgotten how Nathan Dobb and Daniel Hawkins had mistreated him.
“We’ll both stir him up, Leo. But I guess before we go much further we had better get a lawyer’s advice. In a few weeks the circus will make two three-day stops and that will give us a little time, certainly more than we get when we go to a new town every day.”
They talked the matter over for some time longer, and when Leo went to bed it was with the fixed determination to make Squire Dobb “toe the mark.”
And while the young gymnast was meditating thus, Nathan Dobb was walking up and down his office, his face dark and full of cunning.
“The boy’s getting too big and he’s making too many friends,” he muttered to himself. “Why couldn’t he remain a simple farm hand, without trying to rake up the past and make a place for himself?” He took a turn or two and clenched his bony hands. “I wish I had stuck to my original idea and sent him to Africa on that freight steamer without a cent in his pocket.”
Then Nathan Dobb dropped into the chair beside his safe, and from the strong box took a package of documents. These he looked over for nearly half an hour.
“Ten thousand dollars!” he muttered. “It would be a fortune to him! But he shan’t have it. I’ve worked too hard for it to have it slip through my fingers at this late day. I had better burn all these papers and then concoct some scheme for getting him out of the way.”
Nathan Dobb’s soliloquy was interrupted by a crash in the rear of the house. Some one had broken into the kitchen, most likely a burglar.
CHAPTER XI.—A CRIMINAL COMPACT.
There had been several robberies in Hopsville lately, so the squire was certain the burglar had now come to his house.