“I warrant you I can guess where Hiram will be found pretty much all his time at the show,” he remarked, pointedly; and of course the other scout felt impelled to take him up on that positive assertion.
“Say where, then, if you know so much, Mr. Smarty,” he asked Andy.
“Just as soon as he gets the locations down pat,” began the other, “you’ll never see him a great way off from the quarter where the inventions are being exhibited. He’s daffy on mechanics and such things; and he’ll be worse than any sticking plaster you ever saw, once he gets planted in front of the booths, or finds out where the aëroplanes are going up every little while.”
“Oh! well, I own up that’s mostly what I wanted to come all the way out here for,” said Hiram, frankly. “But it’s a toss-up, Andy, that once you get in that amusement park they call the Zone, a place of more’n sixty acres, I read, you’ll spend most of your time watching the Fiji Islanders dance, or riding around on that observation car to view the wonders of Yellowstone Park, or mebbe the Great Colorado Canyon.”
“I can’t get there any too soon, I’m telling you, boys,” Andy confessed. “Both of you have come out here on business as well as sight-seeing; but it’s different in my case. I’m carefree, and bound to enjoy myself to the limit. In good time I’ll wander all over every building in the grounds; but first I want to be amused so as to forget the troubles of our long trip here.”
“It’s very evident,” began Rob, “that we’ll have to settle on some particular place as a sort of general round-up. If each one is going to start off on his own hook, now and then, unless we fix it that way, we might wander all day long through the enormous buildings, and the grounds covered by this Fair, and never meet.”
“Well thought of, Rob!” cried Andy. “Let me suggest that we take this queer-looking tobacconist shop as our rendezvous. We can make an arrangement with the owner for a couple of dollars or so, to take messages, and hold the same for the rest of the bunch.”
“The sooner that’s arranged the better it’ll suit me, I guess,” said Hiram, who was plainly on needles and pins while being kept from hunting up the building in which he would find myriads of remarkable devices illustrating the inventive genius of the world, and particularly of those from the American nation.
“Of course I’m going at once to the exhibit in which Professor McEwen is interested,” said Rob, after they had arranged with the proprietor of the Oriental tobacco booth, “because I’ll not feel easy until I’ve done my part of the contract, and delivered the stuff he intrusted to our charge.”
“H’m, that means me too, I suppose, Rob,” observed Andy, sighing.