CHAPTER VIII
A STARTLING SURPRISE
Dave ran to the door, his heart sinking, and alive with the keenest excitement. Arrived there, he checked himself. He realized that he could not rush out in the shape he was in.
“I can’t do it!” he cried resentfully, as his eyes fell upon the clothes left in place of his own. “Oh, this is terrible!”
A little faint and a good deal dismayed, the youth sat down on the edge of his bed to get a better grasp of the situation. He saw now that he was probably too late to overtake the thief. His eyes fell upon two nickels lying on the floor near the cot. These had been a sort of a guide to the robber, who must have heard them jangle to the floor when Dave accidentally dropped them.
“That fellow must be a real bad one,” mused Dave. “He probably pretended to be asleep all the time, and was watching me! Anyhow, he has managed to get hold of everything I had. The worst of it is the watch and the money and the medal belonging to Mr. King are gone too. The thief may have been gone from here for hours, for all I know. I’m in a bad fix.”
Dave felt very rueful. He had not come up against much of the wickedness of the world before this. He blamed himself for not guarding his possessions more carefully, for coming to the lodging house at all.
“There’s nothing for it but to put on these clothes,” he decided at last, with a sigh. “I don’t suppose it will do any good to tell the lodging house keeper about the thief, and in a big, strange city there is little chance of my running him down.”
The clothes of the boy who had robbed Dave very nearly fitted him. Dave’s own attire had been threadbare in spots, but it had been clean. Somehow, Dave could not repress a feeling of repugnance as he put on the clothes. The shoes pinched, being short and narrow, but he managed to get them on.