CHAPTER XIII.

HOW IT TURNED OUT.

As he turned at hearing this outburst from Walter, Hugh saw something that surprised him very much. Cale was no longer standing there with bowed head, trying to keep his eyes away from the burning gaze of the fakir. He was staring in the direction of the oncoming passengers who had just left the standing train, staring as though he could hardly believe his eyes.

Even as Hugh looked he saw Cale suddenly push Walter and Billy aside as though nothing could hold him back. Straight toward the couple in advance he ran, then stood still in front of them, and uttered a loud cry.

Hugh saw the middle-aged gentleman and stout lady pause. The packages she was holding fell with a crash to the platform; her two arms were outstretched eagerly; and as the scouts stared as though in a dream they saw the boy folded in his mother’s convulsive clasp, while she rained kisses on his face, and the man, too, looked radiant with new-found joy.

Walter leaned up against the scout master weakly.

“Hugh, oh, Hugh, what do you say to that? Just to think, it was my own cousin Spencer, after all, and I didn’t know it. Yes, and I believe his middle name is Caleb, too. Well! well! well! if this isn’t the greatest thing I ever ran up against. There, the boy’s pointing at Old Doc Merritt now, and see how the fakir is trying to sneak away, will you? He knows his cake is all dough, doesn’t he, Hugh?”

“I think your uncle and aunt have recognized him, Walter,” Hugh remarked. “From the way they are acting, and exchanging remarks, I wouldn’t be much surprised if we found that Doc Merritt had a purpose in trying to pull your cousin down to his own low level.”

In the end it actually proved to be so. Aunt Ruth had recognized a man who once upon a time, many years before, had been anxious to have her marry him, and upon being turned down for Reuben, had taken it hard, even to uttering threats. Chancing to meet the boy, he soon found that he could influence him to do his bidding; and in this way, in the end, he had caused him to run away, under the belief that he had done something so terrible that his folks could never forgive him for it.

Hugh and Walter saw the boy beckoning to them, and hastened to join the party, as did the other scouts as well, all of them being greatly elated over the way things were turning out.

“I owe it all to these fine fellows,” the boy was saying to his mother, as he gripped Hugh and Billy by the hand; then he was more than astonished to see Walter kiss his aunt, shake hands with his uncle, telling them at the same time who he was.

Cale did not look like the same boy. No longer was that dejected, hunted expression upon his face. Instead, his countenance fairly glowed with happiness, for like magic all those black clouds had been swept aside, and the sun was beating down on him. Not only was he freed forever from those hateful bonds of servitude that had kept him glued to the fortunes of the fakir, but he had been reconciled to those parents whom he had come to fear were lost to him forever.

It was a jolly party that started to walk to Walter’s house. Spencer, as they must now learn to call the boy known as Cale, clung to Hugh and his cousin. There were many explanations to be made, but by degrees all would be told. Meanwhile that mother and father were contented to know that while their boy had been lost, he was found again; all else mattered little to them.

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.”