Hugh was more than satisfied with the splendid way in which things had turned out. When he, Billy, Ralph and Jack started home, after seeing the rest of the party to the Osborne house, he expressed himself in no uncertain tones along these lines:
“Why, if we’d had the arrangement of things in our own hands, boys, I don’t see how we could have made any improvement on that wind-up at the station. There were the repentant boy, the forgiving mother and father, and the baffled plotter, all mixed up in a bunch. It was a glorious end to our little helping-hand business.”
“And, Hugh,” said Billy, “I really believe that boy will make good after the bitter experience he’s passed through.”
“I’m sure of it,” declared the scout master. “It’s been a terrible lesson to him, and yet, in the end, may have been the greatest thing that could have happened. Bad as he’s been treated, he might have gone to a worse end if this thing hadn’t come to him. Now he will strive to show that forgiving mother what’s in him.”
“I feel like shaking hands with myself just to know I’ve had anything at all to do with cheating that hound of a fakir out of his prey,” said Jack Durham.
“You’re just taking the words out of my mouth when you say that, Jack!” announced Ralph Kenyon, who had been intensely interested in trying to understand just what it was all about; for up to the time he joined the group at the gates of the Fair grounds, Ralph had known nothing at all about the plans of Hugh and Billy to save Cale.
“One thing sure,” said Billy, “we’ll miss the soft, oily voice of Old Doc Merritt on the grounds to-morrow. He’ll never have the nerve to stay around Oakvale after what he saw at the station this evening. A late train to-night will take him away, you mark my words if it isn’t so.”
Sure enough, there was no medicine sold at the Fair on the next day, or Saturday, either; and those disappointed purchasers who may have come back to demand the return of their dollars because the Wonderful New Life Remedy had failed to do what the fakir claimed for it, had their trouble for their pains, and, as Billy said, “their pains also for their trouble.”
CHAPTER XIV.
STOPPED ON THE ROAD—CONCLUSION.
All the same that was not the last some of the boys saw of the exposed fakir, as it turned out.