"I wonder if they mean to cheat me out of it?" said the boy that afternoon, when he looked at the clock and saw it was nearly time to start.
"I hardly think so," replied his mother.
"Why didn't they give the money before they took the tiger away?"
"Probably they hadn't so much with them," suggested Aunt Cynthia, who plainly felt some misgiving over matters; "most likely the money has to be paid by some officer connected with the show."
"And he may say he never gave his men the right to make such an offer," remarked Tom.
"That may be," said the mother, thinking it wise to prepare her son for a probable disappointment; "the circus is to exhibit at Boorman's to-night. That is twenty miles off, and all may have gone thither. If those men choose to disregard their word, I see no help for it."
"It will be awful mean in them," declared the boy, who had become quite nervous; "I'll never catch any more tigers for them."
Tom loitered on his way to Briggsville, striving not to reach there before the time named; but despite the effort, he was in town fully a quarter of an hour too early.
A surprise awaited him. The news of the recapture of the runaway tiger had preceded him; and, as was natural, the story was exaggerated to an absurd degree. Jim Travers had told the wondering people that he saw Tom capture Sipo Tahib, as he called him, by jumping on his back and bending his forepaws over his neck. (Peter Parley's History, which Jim read at school, contained a picture of the naturalist Chatterton thus navigating an alligator, and Jim couldn't see why a tiger should not be handled the same way. He preferred, however, that some other boy should be the one to make the experiment.)
So it was that Tom found himself the hero of the hour. The boys and all his acquaintances gathered round him, and he had to tell the story over and over, until he became tired. When Jim Travers was reminded that Tom's modest account did not agree with his flamboyant yarn, he said he feared he had got things a little mixed, but that was the way he or Tom would have conducted the recapture had the chance been given them.