There was a sneer in the last words which cut Leo to the quick. He drew a long breath.
“Very well, sir, I’ll go,” he said in a strained voice. “But, sir, let me tell you that you are doing me a great injustice.”
Unable to control his feelings any longer, Leo, left the ticket wagon and hurried to the dressing tent.
Here his friends surrounded him and tried to pour words of sympathy into his ears. But he would not listen. Sick at heart, yet burning with indignation, he packed his trunk and prepared to leave.
“Where are you going?” asked Natalie Sparks, with something like a tear in her eye.
“I don’t know, Natalie—I’m too upset to think,” responded Leo, and that was all he could say.
Just before he left Barton Reeve brought him the wages due him, which Leo thrust into his pocket without counting.
“Lambert has got ’em on to-day,” he said. “In a day or two, when he cools down, he’ll be sorry he let you go.”
“It was a mean way to act,” answered the boy bitterly; and then he walked away from the circus grounds. A few blocks off he met a man with an empty wagon and hired him to go and fetch his trunk. When the man came back he asked if there was any hotel or boarding-house on the other side of town, conscious, in a way, that he must put up somewhere.
“Yes, there’s the Eagle Hotel,” said the man. “A good place and very reasonable.”