The tramp’s face lighted up.
“Is your name Vanderbilt?” he asked. “I didn’t expect to make such a haul.”
“Can’t you give me back a dollar out of it? I don’t want to lose all I have.”
“I haven’t got a cent. You’ll have to wait till we meet again. So long, boy! You’ve helped me out of a scrape.”
“Or into one,” thought Carl.
The tramp straightened up, buttoned his dilapidated coat, and walked off with the consciousness of being a capitalist.
Carl watched him with a smile.
“I hope I won’t meet him after he has discovered that the bill is a counterfeit,” he said to himself.
He congratulated himself upon being still the possessor of twenty-five cents in silver. It was not much, but it seemed a great deal better than being penniless. A week before he would have thought it impossible that such a paltry sum would have made him feel comfortable, but he had passed through a great deal since then.
About the middle of the afternoon he came to a field, in which something appeared to be going on. Some forty or fifty young persons, boys and girls, were walking about the grass, and seemed to be preparing for some interesting event.