So as soon as we could, we got Harry off in the woods alone. There
wasn’t much time, because we were all going to hit the trail for
Newburgh after breakfast.
I said, “Harry, that freak fellow in the circus is the same fellow who’s
picture was in the paper; he’s Horace E. Chandler, I’m positive.”
He said, “I told you if you ate too many of those flapjacks last night,
you’d be dreaming dreams.”
“All right,” I told him, “you remember about Marshal Foch; how you said
he was a calf?”
“Let’s have a squint at the picture,” Harry said; “these remarkable
discoveries of yours are getting to be a bad habit. A leopard is bad
enough, but a _what-is-it_!”
So we showed him the picture and he screwed up his face and looked at it
awful funny. Then he read the article all through.
“Well, so you think that’s Wandering Horace, do you?” he asked.
I said, “Yes, because his hair is the same, and that funny kind of a
look in his eye and everything. You’ve got to admit Jib Jab is human.
He’s a nice fellow, too. I bet he’d want to see these fellows get the
reward.”
Harry said, “Yes, I don’t exactly hold it against him that he’s human;
he couldn’t help it I suppose. I’m kind of human myself. But just
suppose, for the fun of it, that you’re right——”
“There’s no fun about it,” I told him; “Dorry and I both saw him.”
“All right,” he said; “and you want to sacrifice him to the Church Mice.
You want to put them on his trail. How do _we_ know he wants to be
discovered?”
“It’s a good turn,” Dorry said.
Harry said, “Well, I’m not a scout and I don’t deal much in good
turns——”
I said, “I bet you did hundreds of them.” And I bet he did, too.
He just said, “But who is the good turn going to hit? What is it you
want to do?”
Dorry said, “We want these fellows to find out who Jib Jab is; we want
to start things going so they can find out of their own accord, before
it’s too late.”
“Yes, and how about poor Jib Jab?” Harry said. “If you harm one person
to help another, do you call that a good turn? How do we know why he’s
traveling with that circus and living in an animal’s skin? Seems to me
we’ve got to consider _him_ when we act.”
Gee, by that I saw that there’s a lot more to good turns than some
fellows think.
“But anyway,” I said, “Harry, that fellow is reckless just like you. Do
you mean to tell me his mother and father haven’t got a right to know
where he is? Just because _you_ went all over the world doesn’t say——”
“Well, there isn’t any mention of his mother and father here,” he said;
“only Mr. Horace E. Wade, up there in Greendale, or whatever they call
it.”
For a couple of minutes, Dorry and I didn’t say anything, and Harry just
sat there on a log whittling a stick.
Then he said, “Let’s see that picture again.”
Dorry handed it to him and he looked at it in that funny, squinty way,
same as before, then handed it back.
“Then can’t we do anything about it?” I asked him.
“How about getting the reward ourselves?” he asked me.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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