Now Rob, through so many dealings with this treacherous fellow in the past, had lost all faith in his possessing the least trait of decency in his composition. In most bad boys with whom Rob had ever had anything to do he could discover some sign of decency, even though it required considerable searching to find it; but upon Jared he had come to look as worthless.
All these promises Rob believed were only made with one idea in view, and this a wild desire to escape the punishment he so richly deserved.
Caught hiding under the bed after their effects had been searched and thrown recklessly around, Jared must certainly be treated as a common thief if arrested, and the management of the hotel would take great satisfaction in prosecuting him if only to discourage other employees from copying his example.
“Let him sit up, boys!” the scout leader told the two who had been pinning both of Jared’s arms to the floor.
They did as Rob requested, but from the way in which Andy and Hiram seemed to watch the culprit, meanwhile holding themselves in complete readiness to hurl their weight upon him at the first show of aggressive action on his part, it was evident that they attached small importance to his claim of repentance.
Rob hardly knew what to do. They had no reason to think well of this scamp who, in the past, never lost an opportunity to do them an ill turn, whether in the home town on the shore of Long Island, down at Panama, or upon the wide plains of Mexico. In Rob’s mind there was no shadow of belief with regard to that promise of reformation, or the gnawing desire to return home.
Still, so far as they knew, nothing had been stolen, so that there was no real reason why they should sink so low as to want to revenge themselves on Jared.
He certainly presented a most pitiable object as he sat there and turned his anxious eyes from one face to another of the four boys with whom he had gone to school for years, and who now held his fate in their hands.
“If I got anything, Rob, I meant to make it up to you later on when I could earn the money,” he was saying again, mistaking that serious look on Rob’s face and fearful that he meant to turn him over to the police. “I’m ready to go back to the farm and work it with the old man. This thing of knockin’ about the world ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, and I’m dead tired of going hungry half the time. Let me off, Rob, won’t you, please? It’d nigh ’bout kill the old woman if she learned I’d been caught tryin’ to steal from my schoolmates.”
Like all cowards, Jared, when he found himself face to face with the consequences of his folly, was ready to play the part of the prodigal son, and bring in his parents as a reason why he should escape punishment. Rob and the other scouts knew his mother and father, and while they had no reason to respect Farmer Applegate, still the fact that Jared was his son and must have almost broken the hearts of his people at home, was bound to influence Rob.