Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/137

 voice called to him. It was the circus manager himself.

"Here, Carrots, this is yours, I guess!"

He handed down to the startled boy a little oblong bit of pasteboard, tinted blue—the most celestial of blues, it always seemed to Lonely—and the boy remembered that it was always blue for children, red for grown-ups.

"Here, you, take a couple more!" said the man hurriedly; then he turned to speak to a passing attendant, without so much as looking at the two little pieces of blue pasteboard he was holding out for the boy to take.

Lonely shook his russet head, sadly but firmly.

In all Chamboro there was not one soul, he very well knew, who could make use of those tickets. He had not a friend in the town to bring along with him. It was useless to think of the Preacher's Son; even Annie Eliza was out of the question. His honors had come to him too late in life; he had been crowned in the hour of dissolution!

And if the man in the black derby hat had not been such a busy and preoccupied