“You mean you want fifty dollars?” he exclaimed, almost in consternation.
“I should say not,” retorted Bud, “but,” and he laughed outright, “if you offer me anything, don’t make it a cent less.”
Before the perplexed official could say anything, Bud was gone. The crowd was in a thick ring around the aeroplane, and the boy had no trouble in making his way almost unobserved out of the race-track field. With ten cents in his pocket and tired and sleepy, he hurried toward the entrance. No one seemed to recognize in him the “hero of the aeroplane,” the skilled and daring aviator who had just made a record breaking flight of 1400 feet in the air.
Money came too hard with Bud to permit him to spend his ten cents for a ride to town in a hack. For that reason, although it was not yet much after four o’clock, he set out on foot to cover the two-mile walk to his home—or Attorney Cyrus Stockwell’s house. This was not a pretentious building, but, being on the edge of town, it had considerable ground around it, and the old two-story frame structure had been Bud’s home for nearly ten years.
Bud’s father had at one time owned a small foundry in Scottsville; but, his health failing, he disposed of it, moved to the country, and tried farming on a small scale. Mrs. Wilson was a cousin of Mrs. Stockwell’s, and when both Bud’s parents died the same winter, the boy, at Mrs. Stockwell’s suggestion, went to live with the Stockwells. There he had been ever since.
Reaching the house, Bud found it locked tight as wax. Undoubtedly the lawyer and his wife had gone to the fair. The key, usually hidden under the strip of rag carpet on the front porch, was not there. But this did not interfere much with Bud. In the rear was a summer kitchen with an adjoining grape arbor. On this arbor, Bud had more than once made nocturnal ascents and descents to and from the kitchen roof, and thus to the window of his own room.
Shinning up the arbor, he easily entered the house through the window of his room. It was dark and close within, but the returned wanderer was hungry and he hurried at once to the kitchen. Mrs. Stockwell did not mind Bud “piecing,” but she was particular about the neatness of her kitchen. So, instead of leaving traces of his attack on the larder, Bud used no dishes. He found milk in the ice box. A dipperful of that was consumed, and the dipper washed and returned to its hook.
Then with a slice of cold boiled ham, the back, two wings and the neck of some fried chicken, six doughnuts, two pieces of bread covered with new grape jelly, and an apple, Bud went to his room. Long before his foster parents returned from the fair, Bud, his hunger satisfied, had undressed, washed himself and gone to bed.