“We’ll be glad to have you along, Tubby,” said Andy.
“That goes without saying,” added Hiram; while Rob smiled, and nodded in a way that Tubby knew meant “those are my sentiments, too, every time.”
The next thing on the program was seeing Yellowstone Park, another scenic trip so realistic that Andy declared he would always have trouble convincing himself he had not actually been through the National Reservation where the hot springs and geysers flowed, some of the latter rising a hundred and fifty feet into the air, with steam and vapor forming a dense canopy around.
It was just after they had come out from this that the absence of Hiram was discovered. Tubby professed to be somewhat alarmed, and feared their old chum might have fallen from the observation car; but Rob set his mind straight when he admitted that he had seen Hiram sneaking away.
“He’d reached his limit of endurance,” he told Andy when the latter expressed his opinion of one who cared so little for amusement; “and we’ve got to remember that our chum is a queer fish at best. Besides, his heart is wrapped up in things along a certain line. Let him go his way; and later on, perhaps, when some of us have grown a little tired of all this clatter in the Zone, we’ll hunt up the aviation field and see what Hiram is doing.”
Andy had many more things on his list, but Rob told him not to try and rush it all into one afternoon.
“Take it easy, Andy,” he advised. “‘Rome wasn’t built in a day,’ you remember. We’re going to be around these haunts for a good long while, and one by one we can see all the shows that are gathered here—that is, all worth seeing. These odd people from the wilds interest me considerably, too, so that I wouldn’t miss looking in on their villages, where they’re genuine, as most of them are, because the management stand for that fact.”
It may have been nearer four o’clock than three, when, being more or less tired with their first day at the Exposition, the three chums turned their faces in a quarter that up to then none of them had visited save Tubby, and he only casually.
“We’ll take a look in at the aëroplane boys first,” said Rob; “and if we don’t run across Hiram there, we will go over to the building where he says many of the latest inventions are on exhibition.”
It was not difficult to discover which way to go, for overhead several aëroplanes were whizzing this way and that. Far up in the heavens they could see a small speck which was no doubt some daring pilot trying for an altitude record.