“It makes me laugh when I remember how he almost licked Rob’s hand, and promised to be good if only he was let go,” said Hiram, rather disdainfully.
“That sounds as if you didn’t have much faith in Jared’s promises to reform?” said Rob, smilingly.
“He never meant a word of it, and I know it!” declared Hiram. “I could see the nasty snap in his eyes just like they used to be. Haven’t we known him to crawl and make all sorts of big promises before, but always to break the same the first chance he had? Huh! that money in his pocket was never earned honestly, I’d like to wager; and it won’t be used either to carry him back home.”
“Oh, well, he’s left the hotel, which is one good thing,” said Rob. “I thought it was my business to find out this morning, for as we knew him to be a thief it hardly seemed fair to keep quiet, and not put a flea in the ear of the management here.”
“He saved you the trouble then by skipping out?” remarked Andy.
“Yes, I suppose he imagined we might tell on him as a duty, and thought he had better leave between two days,” Rob explained. “Of course, when I learned he had thrown up his job, been paid off, and was gone, I concluded it was no use saying anything more about it.”
“Like as not Jared’s been doing more than one shady job since he came here,” suggested Hiram, shrewdly, “and he was afraid they’d take him to task for the same, p’r’aps shut him up in a cell; so he concluded to get away while the going was good. Well, here’s hoping we may never run across the snake again.”
“I don’t know,” ventured Tubby. “Seems like there’s some queer fatality about it, but we do come on that scamp in the most remarkable ways. There he was down in Mexico, and before that at Panama. To think that he’d be out here where the Big Show’s going on, and of all places acting as a porter in the very hotel where we took up our quarters.”
“‘The pitcher that goes once too often to the well comes to grief,’ they say,” mentioned Rob. “If Jared keeps on bobbing up as he has been doing, and getting in our way, he’ll rue it some time or other.”
As the days came and went, Rob and his three chums certainly managed to have the time of their lives. If there was one part of that mammoth Exposition that they failed to investigate it was not because they wasted any of their time; at least this could be said for Rob and Tubby, who were most energetic in making the grand rounds.