“Just looking up my scattered relations as I hop about the world, Aunt Mary,” he had announced to Mrs. Hardy. “Here to-day and there to-morrow. I won’t bother you more than this afternoon and to-night. It makes a fellow feel he’s got something to tie to, you know, when he gets lonely, so I thought I would drop in on you.”
Bob had been an orphan for two years. Thrown on his own resources, he had gone to work on the first job that offered with a smile, and left it for another one with a hurrah. He fascinated Ben with the happy, good-natured way in which he took the ups and downs of business life.
“Every regular job I get,” declared Bob, airily, “there was a separate and distinct hoodoo about it. For instance, the first man I worked for was a groceryman. He confidentially instructed me on his short weight tactics one night and I left the next morning. My second employer was a clothier. He insisted on paying off my first month’s salary in a suit damaged by fire and water and four sizes too big for me, so I left him and became a clerk in a dry goods store. My boss there nearly starved me and made me sleep on a box under a stairway. I pined for fresh air and took to the road.”
Bob explained that “taking to the road” meant for him, first, a ticket collector for a side show at a circus, next, a brief career at driving a band wagon, and lastly as a chauffeur.
“I am now pretty good at handling a machine,” he declared, “and am on my way to a new job for a crack automobile man who makes a specialty of racing for prizes.”
Bob brought a rather exciting atmosphere into the quiet Hardy home, but it did not harm any. He succeeded in stirring up some new ideas in the active mind of Ben, but the latter, his folks knew, loved home life too fondly to ever become a confirmed rover. Then, too, Bob was a boy of excellent principles. There was no bravado or recklessness about his exuberant spirits. He was manly and always seeing the bright side of things, adventurous and undaunted by trivial disappointments.
“I’ll make it some day—in a big way. I feel it in my bones,” he insisted hopefully.
“I hope you do,” replied Ben.
“So will you,” declared Bob, enthusiastically, the next day, when, in showing his guest about his little work room at home, Ben brought to light a whistle he had invented. It consisted of a bent circle of tin. This was perforated on one side, and this in connection with a peculiar shaping of the outer lip of the device enabled a person to give out a shrill call that could be heard fully a mile distant on a quiet day.
Ben had distributed freely samples of his handicraft among his boy chums, and on picnic occasions the woods would ring with what his comrades called a bird call. The modest young inventor noticed, however, that most of the users of the whistles never got much beyond a commonplace squeak, while the shrill efforts of the adepts scared the birds away instead of attracting them.