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 Praise for
THE AUTOMATION ADVANTAGE

This book is a practical guide for how to make an impact and realize
value from automation. There is a strong focus on the real-world
execution of an automation strategy that makes it an accessible
must-read for both a business management and technology
audience.
—MIKE CRISAFULLI, SVP of Software Engineering at Comcast

Consistently creating value with technology is hard. The Automation

Advantage makes it simple. The authors lay out a comprehensive
path using modern techniques that will be appreciated by both the
thinker and the practitioner.
—MARK SPYKERMAN, Chief Information Officer of
AmerisourceBergen

The pandemic has required businesses to hit the fast-forward button

on adopting technology while becoming agile enough to be ready for
what emerges next. The Automation Advantage couldn’t have come
at a better time, providing a comprehensive road map to launch
automation and AI initiatives at scale and accelerating technology-
driven transformation.
—PAUL DAUGHERTY, Group Chief Executive – Technology
and Chief Technology Officer of Accenture and coauthor of
Human+Machine
A brilliant field manual for the coming Automation Age.
—RICHARD D’AVENI, Bakala Professor of Strategy at Tuck
School of Business at Dartmouth College and author of The
Pan-Industrial Revolution

As with any transformation effort, getting your people to embrace

change can be challenging. The Automation Advantage clearly
identifies common myths and barriers and how they can be
addressed through a human-centric approach. This is not a book of
strategy. It’s a book of execution that will enable your organization
with actions to take in order to succeed.
—ANDY NALLAPPAN, Chief Technology Officer of Broadcom

Successful intelligent automation requires you to get more than just

the technology right. The Automation Advantage addresses this
clearly and effectively by providing the guiding principles and steps
for changing your organization’s technology, governance, culture,
and even leadership style.
—CHARLENE LI, entrepreneur, speaker, and New York Times
bestselling author of The Disruption Mindset

The authors cut through the hype to explore why automation is the
necessary discipline to ensure your processes provide the data—at
speed—to achieve your business outcomes. The Automation
Advantage takes us on a refreshing journey that aligns how
enterprise operations leaders need to approach automation and AI in
the virtual economy.
—PHIL FERSHT, CEO and Chief Analyst of HFS Research

A great book, with ample examples of automation at work. It

cements all the ideas and discussions I have had on this topic with
the expert automation team at Accenture.
 —RAJIV KAKAR, Group Chief Information Officer of
Thai Union

A CIO needs vision, leadership, and the technical nous to execute

successfully. A world with zero human-touch application
maintenance is absolutely attainable—a world with self-healing and
self-configuring systems powered by AI. The Automation Advantage
sets out a strategic approach to getting there, from both a
technology and human perspective.
—ED ALFORD, Chief Technology Officer of New Look

We are entering a world of autonomous enterprises where analytics,

automation, and AI converge. The Automation Advantage definitively
shows how organizations can improve decision velocity and precision
decisions.
—R “RAY” WANG, CEO of Constellation Research and author
of Everybody Wants to Rule the World
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To the memory of all Accenture employees who lost their lives
fighting Covid-19
 CONTENTS

Foreword by Julie Sweet, CEO of Accenture

Preface: Sharing What Works

Acknowledgments

CHAPTER 1 The Intelligence Imperative

CHAPTER 2 Beware the Barriers
CHAPTER 3 Start with Strategic Intent
CHAPTER 4 Choose Your Spots and Map Your
Journey
CHAPTER 5 Plan the Plan
CHAPTER 6 Architect for the Future
CHAPTER 7 Inspire the Transformation
CHAPTER 8 Sustain the Gains
CHAPTER 9 Relevance, Resilience, and
Responsibility
Notes

Index
 FOREWORD
by Julie Sweet, CEO of Accenture

T
he Covid-19 pandemic made it very clear that technology is a
lifeline for economies, governments, organizations, and people.
It not only helped us solve immediate challenges and stay
connected with one another—it also changed the way we see and
understand the world.
Automation, the focus of this insightful and extremely practical
book, is no small part of this change. Like many other technologies,
automation advanced greatly over the past decade with the rise of
intelligent systems—encompassing capabilities like applied artificial
intelligence (AI), industrial and process robotics, and service robots.
Now, due to the impact of the pandemic, the pace of automation
innovation is moving much faster than we anticipated.
There is no better guide to automation than Bhaskar Ghosh,
Accenture’s chief strategy officer and former group chief executive of
Accenture Technology Services. I have worked with him for many
years, and his invaluable vision and counsel have helped countless
companies through their digital transformations. In The Automation
Advantage, Bhaskar and his coauthors, Rajendra Prasad and
Gayathri Pallail, draw on their veteran expertise to explain how
automation works—and how it works best. They cut through myths
and misunderstandings to blaze a clear trail for any business leader
looking to develop an automation strategy, create new value, and
realize growth—all with a human-centric approach.
 Because like all technologies, automation should never be
considered in isolation—it’s always in the context of solving human
problems. I often tell other CEOs that if someone comes to them
and says, “I have an automation project” or “I have a blockchain
initiative,” they should say, “No.” They shouldn’t even ask what it is,
because no initiative should ever start with technology. Ultimately,
technology enables; it’s about empowering people.
Currently, we estimate that we are at only 15 to 20 percent of
what could be automated. We’re going to see that percentage
rapidly increase, as automation continues to spread from manual
processes, such as building cars in a factory, to enhancing mental
processes, such as giving a consumer a consistently better customer
experience. Automation is helping companies actively grow their
businesses through speed, safety, quality, cost-efficiency, and
resilience.
Seizing this opportunity, companies are investing in this
technology and creating jobs. But are people ready and able to fill
them? Are young people leaving high school with basic technology
skills and digital literacy? The answer in many cases is no. Before the
pandemic, we were not ready to address the growing global
reskilling need that automation is bringing. Unfortunately, we still are
not prepared. As companies, we have a huge responsibility to reskill,
and it is imperative that we bring together government, educational
institutions, and not-for-profits with equal speed to partner on
addressing this need.
As we enter the postpandemic era, we are seeing a world
awakened to an incredible opportunity to reimagine and rebuild
responsibly and sustainably. Instead of seeing automation as a
technology that competes with people for jobs, it can and should be
considered a way to contribute to our shared success. By eliminating
mundane and repetitive tasks, automation allows us to focus human
attention where it’s most needed—on creativity, empathy, and critical
thinking. The Automation Advantage helps us understand not only
how automation can create value for a business but also how its
unique combination of technology and human ingenuity can play a
part in transforming the global economy into one that works for the
benefit of all.
 PREFACE
Sharing What Works

T
he year is 2019, and the place is a beautifully furnished meeting
room in a modern office tower—the headquarters of a global
company. We’ve come to town to meet with a management
team considering a complex operational business issue, which we
think presents a great opportunity for intelligent automation. We’re
confident we can make a case for this with the information we’ve
assembled, which anticipates the questions these executives will
probably have.
First, they’ll likely ask: “What is intelligent automation?”
Answer: It’s the new era of automation in which machines are
used to perform tasks formerly reserved for humans—tasks that
involve analyzing data, making decisions, and learning from what
follows once decisions are implemented.
Second, they’ll ask: “Why should we invest in automation like this
—will it really make us a better company?”
Answer: Your competitive edge will still depend, more than ever,
on your people’s talents, but you’ll be able to leverage and augment
those talents to an unprecedented level.
Third: “Are other companies in our industry already moving in this
direction—and is it paying off?”
Answer: Yes. (We’ve done our research.)
Finally, they’ll ask, “Given our other priorities, why is now the
right time to invest?”
 But as the meeting begins, the surprise is on us. These aren’t the
questions the executives ask.
As we share our thoughts on known pain points in their type of
business and how automation could help, the executives are already
nodding and pushing us along. This is a group already convinced
that the opportunities are exceptional. It turns out there have been
pockets of experimentation going on in their organization, and these
limited, one-off solutions have been yielding seriously good results.
So this top team wants to take things to the next level.
They’re past the why questions and well into the how. As they
aim to approach the automation opportunity at scale, they want to
know where to start. How to identify top business cases and how to
determine the priority order in which to address them. How to
assess their legacy systems and data issues that might delay them.
They also wonder how they can be sure their people—both the
technology staff and the business users of the new tools—will value
the change and want to be part of it.
It turned out to be the best boardroom conversation we’d had all
year, as we found ourselves talking excitedly about the very issues
consuming us personally at that moment. We’d been working with a
variety of leading companies that had reached the same “scaling”
point in their intelligent automation journeys, and we had been able
to identify important patterns, the common pitfalls, and the clever
solutions that cut across their companies.
As a technology consulting team with a practice area to lead, we
had been pulling together these lessons and trying to distill them
into practical guidance on designing and implementing successful
automation projects. Now, the observations were jelling into insights
that we knew could genuinely accelerate an organization’s progress.
And guess what: the following month, we had a very similar
conversation with another company’s management team, also
jumping ahead to the “how” questions—and then a great workshop
with yet another right after that. We found ourselves repeating key
messages and refining them, figuring out how best to organize and
articulate the principles we were developing in practice. Eventually,
we felt like we had covered all the major bases and developed a
point of view on each of them, whether in a white paper, blog post,
speech, methodology module, or presentation deck—however, we
felt we should really pull them together into one coherent package.
One of us named the challenge at that point: “That would require a
whole book.” And here we are.
The book you hold in your hand is designed to answer that smart
set of burning questions we continue to be asked by managers and
leaders who want to proceed quickly and confidently in automation
initiatives. But if we’re setting the whole context for how this book
came about, we also have to mention that other big source of
pressure that hit organizations all around the world in 2020—much
as we might all want to forget it. We were well into the process of
writing the book when Covid-19 hit, and we, our company, and all
our clients found ourselves struggling to protect our people, help our
customers, and remain productive amid a devastating pandemic.
We know and work with many academics, management gurus,
and analysts focused on the realm of intelligent automation, and
sometimes we envy their situations. For some of them, a lockdown
on global travel and orders to work from home made this a year
when they suddenly had more capacity to reflect and write. For us, it
was a crazy time of demand for client solutions, as automation
became more important than ever. This was an urgent realization by
many firms.
As early as April 2020, Information Age reported that HFS
Research surveyed 631 major enterprises about how they
anticipated the pandemic would affect their strategies and
operations. One of its questions asked: “How do you expect Covid-
19 to impact your spending” in 10 major areas of technology
investment. Fully 55 percent of respondents knew already that their
spending on automation would increase, making this the second
most reported increase after cybersecurity—both obvious concerns
as so much mission-critical work moved abruptly to online
platforms.1
 For us, the challenges came simultaneously on many fronts—in
our client projects, every one of which is unique, and also within our
own company. Accenture itself moved instantly to new modes of
staying productive—away from the consulting industry norm by
which professionals spend the bulk of their time on-site at client
locations and generate much of their value through in-person
working sessions. The companies we had already been helping with
automation seemed most eager to double down on that work. For
companies seeking hyperautomation before (where discrete
automated tasks roll up into seamlessly automated processes, and
automated analysis identifies for itself new opportunities to take
automation into new realms), the pandemic crisis pushed those
ambitions further.
Having a book to complete in the midst of all this was not what
we had anticipated when we signed the contract with our publisher.
Yet there was a silver lining, too. We think the fact that we were so
deeply in the mode of capturing and explaining principles from real-
world engagements made it easier for us to make sense of this new,
very dynamic, and frankly unnerving situation.
In many ways, this book represents the synthesis of long
experience. The real veteran among us is Bhaskar Ghosh, who has
spent a career as an automation advocate and been responsible for
many groundbreaking solutions. He and “RP,” as all of Rajendra
Prasad’s friends and colleagues call him, have worked together on
many of these, ranging from small projects to large transformations.
Since then, often with Gayathri Pallail leading the charge, we have
helped many clients apply intelligent automation to remove pain
points in risk management, sales strategy, customer service, and
more.
As Accenture’s work in this area increased, we also found ways to
make our own company’s internal processes more effective using
automation solutions like workflow systems. The human factor is
also critical. We’ve approached our internal automation opportunities
with creativity, empathy, and innovation in the spirit of keeping the
human advantage front and center for organizations we work with.
In any situation where people must solve a complex problem, we’re
convinced they can do it better if augmented by robust automation.
Along the way, we’ve seen our colleagues make many technical
and managerial breakthroughs. In fact, as we began work on this
book, the news came that Accenture had just been granted its 60th
patent related to intelligent automation. To us, this is a real point of
pride. We noted already that we stay close to the discoveries being
made by leading researchers in universities, startups, and research
and development labs. The work they do is invaluable to us. But
meanwhile, our great privilege is that we are able to innovate in the
setting of a global professional services company where we work
with the world’s largest and most sophisticated companies. Their
managers and leaders are inspirational. They are eager to get real
innovation done. The problems they need to solve matter to their
success and to the world.
Working where we do also means that we benefit from a culture
that prizes discovery—and the documentation and dissemination of it
to the world. This is evident from the constant stream of forward-
looking research that Accenture publishes in every form imaginable
—from podcasts to survey reports to high-level strategy books. In a
company that invests heavily in staying at the cutting edge, it is a
cultural value that we should have research-backed perspectives to
offer our clients and other stakeholders.
But while we earn our patents for inventions that are specialized
and technology focused, it’s critical that our client-serving teams can
connect those with the problems of clients, even when the client
involved is dealing with a highly strategic issue and talking in very
big-picture terms. To our people, it may be clear that the patented
tool or technique directly contributes to the client solution, but it
isn’t always obvious to others. A book like this can equip more
people in the business world with the story line that explains why
this fast-evolving intelligent automation technology is so important
to achieve business objectives, and what it takes to put it in place, at
scale.
 To be clear, this is not a strategy book—it’s an execution book.
Our self-assigned mission was to produce a truly practical guide. So
yes, we devote an opening chapter to offering some historical
context on automation and making the case for why it is now the
time to invest in cognitive technologies—but we then move quickly
into content relevant to organizations who already sense there is a
big opportunity and want to translate that enthusiasm into action.
We identify the most common barriers to acting on that sense in
Chapter 2, as a way of setting up the value of what follows; all of it
is geared toward overcoming these obstacles. In Chapter 3, we
emphasize the need to be clear on strategic intent because a shared
commitment to the business priorities is the necessary North Star to
guide every aspect of planning and implementation. This strategic
imperative segues directly into Chapter 4, which focuses on how to
choose wisely from the seemingly endless opportunities most
organizations face to automate some activity or another. Hint: it has
as much to do with overall capability building and intelligent
automation maturity as with the potential bottom-line impact of
individual solutions.
Throughout, we place emphasis on what it takes to derive the
highest value from investments, and we address very ground-level
problems and considerations. In Chapter 5, we explain how to map
out an implementation plan, put governance in place, and keep track
of progress. In Chapter 6, we get into technology discussions on
how to architect a future-proof automation—at a level that is
understandable to not just the technology team, but also other
functional executives and general managers. In Chapter 7, we
discuss the “soft stuff” that all experienced leaders know is really the
hard stuff: change management, reskilling, organizational culture,
and other elements of people management. At a high level, we
underscore the takeaway advice at the end of each chapter, but we
urge you to delve deep into the stories that bring the advice to life
and the research findings that back up its validity. Our objective in
the text has been to write to that all-important midlevel that helps
the most strategic thinkers in organizations understand the art of the
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 CHAPTER XXIV
JACK’S BAD FALL

Behind the big brute came a score of the animal men, armed with
clubs, pitchforks, iron bars and elephant hooks. But Bill Henyon was
not among them. The elephant trainer—the master of Ajax—had
given that big brute his last command, for, as they ran, the men from
the animal tent told how the elephant had seized Henyon in his
trunk, and dashed him to the ground, maiming him so terribly that he
was a cripple for life.
But now every man who could be spared from the circus grounds
started to race after the fleeing elephant. Canvasmen, drivers,
trainers, even the trapeze performers, joined in the hunt, and of
course Jack, Sam, and several of the other clowns were there.
“If he runs toward town he’ll do a lot of damage, and maybe kill two
or three people before his rage dies down,” said Sam.
“Can’t they catch him in time?” asked Jack.
“It’s a hard question. There, he’s heading for the creek. Maybe that’ll
cool him off.”
The circus tents had been pitched near a small stream, and toward
this the big brute was now headed, for, heavy as an elephant is, he
can outrun a man for a short distance, and sometimes beat him in a
long race.
Into the water plunged Ajax, filling his trunk with it and spraying it all
about. He took up his position in the middle of the stream, as if to bid
defiance to his pursuers.
“Go slow now,” cautioned Hank Servdon, who was the boss animal
man. “I’ll keep him engaged in front, while some of you sneak up
behind and shackle one leg with a long chain.”
It was a risky plan, but it worked. While Hank slowly approached
Ajax from in front, wading out into the creek, with his elephant hook
raised, ready to catch it in the sensitive trunk of the brute, other men
approached through the water at the rear, holding in readiness heavy
chains. Ajax concentrated all his attention on Hank, whom he
doubtless hoped to treat as he had served poor Henyon.
“Ajax! Attention! Up! Up!” suddenly cried Hank, giving the beast the
order to stand on his hind legs. Habit was too much for the brute,
enraged as he was. With a trumpet of protest, he rose slowly.
 “To bid defiance to his pursuers”
Page 188
“Now, men!” cried Hank, and in a trice two chains had been slipped
about the hind legs. Ajax was caught before he had gotten into town,
but there was sorrow among the circus folk when they heard how
grievously Bill Henyon was hurt. Ajax had caught him unawares, as
the elephant man stooped over to adjust one of the chains that the
big creature had pulled loose.
But the show must go on, no matter what happens to the employees
or performers, and when the news got around that one of the
elephants in the circus had nearly killed his keeper there was a
bigger crowd than usual at the night performance, every one anxious
for a glimpse of Ajax.
The brute had quieted down somewhat, but there was an extra fence
of ropes about his enclosure in the animal tent, and he was so
heavily shackled with chains that it would have been a task even
beyond his terrible strength to get loose.
Every one in the circus was more or less nervous that night, and
even the veteran performers on the high wire and on the flying
trapeze did not feel so sure of themselves as usual.
Once, during a particularly long jump clear across the tent, when one
of the trapeze performers swings loose to catch in the hands of
another, there was a miscalculation, and the performer fell quite a
distance into the net. After that Mr. Paine called the act off.
“It’s too risky,” he said. “I’m afraid something’s going to happen to-
night.”
Perhaps all this got on Jack’s nerves, for, though he was usually
clear headed, he found himself feeling somewhat nervous as he
climbed to the top of his platform, ready for his first leap with the
flying machine.
“Pshaw!” he exclaimed to himself. “What’s the matter with me,
anyhow? I’m thinking too much of poor Mr. Henyon. Well, here
goes,” and he launched himself down.
He landed safely, amid the laughter of the crowd at his queer act.
“I guess I’m all right,” he thought. His success made him more
confident, and he did the next two turns even better than the first.
Then came the last one.
“I’m tired to-night,” thought Jack. “I don’t feel just like myself. Guess I
must be getting homesick. Oh, but I would like to see dad and mom
again! I wish I was back in Westville, even if the professor would
have me arrested. Well, here goes for the last turn, and then I’m
going to bed and sleep.”
There was some delay in getting his platform over to the far side of
the tent, where he was to make his last jump, and it was almost time
for the final races when it was in position.
Jack climbed up, and his airship was hoisted up to him. He did his
customary song and dance, and then prepared to give his exhibition
of flying. Yet in spite of the confidence that had come back to him
when he found that he had done the trick three times successfully,
he felt his nervousness returning.
“I guess I’d better take a tonic,” he told himself. “Well, here goes.”
He leaped forward, grasping the handle of the big umbrella that
extended down through the distended bag. He expected to feel
himself buoyed up as usual by the big Japanese affair, but as his
feet began to work the pedals controlling the wings, and as he got
ready to pull the strings to fire the shot and display the flags and
rooster, he realized that something was wrong. The umbrella was not
holding him up. In fact, he was falling swiftly to the ground.
The crowd not understanding that something was wrong, began to
laugh as it always did, but there was terror in Jack’s heart.
Suddenly there was a ripping sound, and the big umbrella turned
inside out. Jack fell rapidly and heavily toward the earth, having no
support to break his terrific fall.
As he landed, his hand unconsciously pulled the strings and the shot
was fired, the flags fluttered out, and the rooster crowed. The crowd
yelled and applauded, but poor Jack felt a pain in his left leg as if
some one had run a red-hot iron into it. Then it seemed as if some
one had hit him on the head with a club. The lights, high up on the
tent poles, died away. All became black, and Jack knew nothing
more.
 CHAPTER XXV
LEFT BEHIND—CONCLUSION

When Jack regained his senses he found himself in a soft bed, and,
as his eyes roved about they did not encounter the familiar hangings
of the circus sleeping-car. Instead, they saw a room neatly papered,
and at a window hung with white curtains sat a young lady. Jack
stirred uneasily. Perhaps he was dreaming.
The woman at the window heard him, and came over to the bed.
“So you’re awake, are you?” she asked pleasantly. “How do you
feel?”
“Rather—sore—and—stiff,” replied Jack slowly. “What’s—the—
matter—with—my leg?”
“Oh, nothing much. It’s broken, that’s all; but the doctor says it’s a
clean break. You’ll soon be better.”
“My—head——”
“Yes, you got quite a bad blow on the head, and you’ve been
unconscious for several hours, but it’s nothing serious.”
“Unconscious for several hours?” repeated Jack more quickly.
“Where’s the circus?”
“It’s gone on.”
“Gone on? And—left—me—behind?”
He spoke more slowly, and he felt a queer sensation. A lump came
into his throat. His eyes felt hot and heavy. Surely he couldn’t be
going to cry? Of course not!
“Left—behind!” he murmured. “They left me behind!”
“Why, they couldn’t take you with them,” said the pretty young
woman. “You couldn’t stand it to be moved, you know. But they felt
dreadfully bad at leaving you.”
“Who did?” asked Jack dully.
“Oh, ever so many. There was one big man with a red tie, Mr. Rain, I
think he said his name was.”
“Mr. Paine. That’s the manager.”
“Yes. Well, he gave orders that you should be taken good care of.
Then there was a clown, I guess, for all the paint wasn’t washed off
his face when he came here. He left a lot of addresses for you,
where the show would be.”
“That was Sam Kyle.”
“Yes; and then there was, oh, such a fat lady! She said she once had
a boy just like you, and she made me promise to give you chicken
broth every day. You have a lot of friends in that circus.”
“Where am I?” asked Jack, beginning to feel a little better at these
evidences of care.
“Why, you’re in a room at the hotel, and I’m a sort of nurse. Mr. Rain
—I mean Mr. Paine—engaged me for you before he left. Now you’re
to be quiet, for the doctor doesn’t want you to get excited.”
“How long will I have to stay here?” asked Jack.
“Oh, about a month. But don’t fret.”
“A month? Why, the show will close then, and I can’t be with it.
Who’ll do my act? I must go!”
He tried to sit up, but the pain in his leg, and the ache in his head,
made him fall back on the pillow. The nurse gave him some quieting
medicine, and he soon fell asleep. When he awakened he felt much
better, though he was almost heartbroken at the thought of being left
behind. He questioned the nurse and she told him what had
happened.
There had been some flaw in the umbrella he used, and it had
collapsed, letting him fall almost the entire forty feet to the ground.
That he had not been worse hurt was regarded as very fortunate.
The show had been obliged to go on, but Mr. Paine had left a goodly
sum with the hotel proprietor for Jack’s board, and had also left a
note telling the boy that all his savings, including his salary to the
end of the season, would be held for him, and sent wherever he
requested.
So there was nothing for Jack to do but to remain in bed. How he
longed to be with the show, and performing his act again, even after
the accident, no one but himself knew. He said nothing about it to the
nurse, but there was a great longing in his heart.
The nurse and the hotel people were kind to him, but all the while the
boy was becoming more and more homesick. He was worrying and
fretting about his parents, and he had about made up his mind to
write to Professor Klopper. This fretting did him no good, in fact it
increased his fever.
“That boy has something on his mind more than merely being left
behind by the circus,” said the doctor to the nurse one day. “If he
doesn’t get quieter he’ll have a relapse, and that will be bad.”
“I’ll see if I can’t find out what it is,” the nurse said. None of the circus
people had told Jack’s story.
The day after this Jack asked for something to read, and while the
nurse went to get him a book she handed him a newspaper,
published in a town not far from where Jack lived. He looked at it idly
hoping he might see some item about the circus, but the show had
evidently passed farther on.
Then, as he turned the pages, he caught sight of an item that gave
him a sudden start.
For, staring at him, in black type on the white page, was this notice,
dated from Westville, where he lived:
“Information Wanted concerning Jack Allen, supposed
to be with a traveling circus. He left his home with
Professor Klopper under a misapprehension. Everything is
 all right. If he sees this will he please communicate at
once with the undersigned? A reward will be paid for
suitable information of the whereabouts of the boy.
“Sylvester Allen.”
“It’s my father! My father! He’s back from China!” cried Jack. “Hurrah!
Dad’s back! Hurry, some one! Get me a pen and paper. I’ll write at
once! No, I’ll telegraph! Whoop! Now I’m all right!”
The nurse came running back into the room.
“What is it?” she asked. “What has happened? You must not excite
yourself. You will have a relapse.”
“I don’t care if I do,” cried Jack. “My father and mother are back from
their trip around the world. They’re back from China. I must telegraph
them at once.”
“Here, drink this. It will quiet you,” said the nurse, thinking Jack was
out of his mind.
“I don’t want to be quiet! I want to yell and sing! Dad’s home! So’s
mother! I’m all right now!”
It took him some time to convince the nurse that he knew what he
was talking about, but when he had showed her the notice in the
paper, and had told his story, she brought him a telegraph blank, and
the happy boy sent a long message to his father.
How anxiously he waited for the answer! At last it came:
“Dear Jack: We will be with you as soon as possible.
Father and mother. The professor is coming, too.”
“I don’t know that I want to see the professor,” mused Jack, “but I
guess it must be all right, or dad wouldn’t bring him.”
Three hours later Jack was being clasped in his mother’s arms, while
Mr. Allen, with moisture in his eyes, was holding his son’s hand.
“My poor boy!” said his mother. “To think of you being a clown in a
circus!”
“It was bully fun, while it lasted,” said Jack enthusiastically. “But I
guess I’ve had enough of it. But what happened to you? Why didn’t
you write?”
“We couldn’t, Jack,” replied his father. “We were detained in a
province which was surrounded by warring Chinese factions, and we
couldn’t get out, nor send any word. When we did, your mother and I
decided we had had enough of traveling around the world and we
started for home. We got here, after sending word to the professor
that we were coming, but when we arrived we found that you had run
away.”
“Did he—did he tell you what for?”
“Yes, Jack,” said Professor Klopper, coming forward awkwardly. “And
I want to beg your pardon. I—I fear I was a bit hasty.”
“Then you know I didn’t steal the cup?” asked Jack rather coldly.
“No one stole it. It fell down behind my bureau, and slipped into a
hole in the wall where the plaster was off. I found it not long after you
had—er—left so unceremoniously, and I wished I could have found
you.
“Then when I got word from your folks, and I managed to learn that
you had joined a circus, I went to the performance, though I do not
believe in such frivolous amusements. But I could not find you to tell
you the good news. I suppose you were with some other amusement
enterprise, Jack?”
“No, I saw you,” replied the boy, laughing now, “but I kept out of your
way. I was afraid you wanted to arrest me.”
“Poor Jack!” whispered his mother. “You had a dreadful time!”
“Oh, not so bad,” was the answer. “I earned about three hundred
dollars, and I’ve got most of it saved up.”
“Three hundred dollars, if put out at six per cent interest, and
compounded, will double itself in eleven years, three hundred and
twenty-seven days,” remarked the professor thoughtfully. “I would
recommend that you do that with your money. In less than twelve
years you would have six hundred dollars.”
“Not for mine,” said Jack, with a laugh. “I’m going to buy a
motorcycle as soon as my leg gets well. That’s as near flying as I
care to go for a while.”
Jack was taken home as soon as it was practical to move him, and
he and the professor became pretty good friends afterward, for it
was no small matter for the dictatorial old college teacher to admit, to
a mere boy, that such wisdom as could figure out the hardest
problem in trigonometry could be wrong when it came to the simple
matter of a missing gold cup.
Jack got his motorcycle, and a beauty it was, for when he received
his money from the circus treasurer he found it was nearer four
hundred than three hundred dollars. Part of it he decided to save.
“Because you know,” said Jack, “I might some day want to buy a
flying machine, and if I put some money out at interest long enough I
can get it.”
With the check that represented his savings from the circus came a
letter from the manager, stating that whenever he wanted an
engagement he could have one. There were messages from all his
friends, and a pass to the show good forever at any place where the
Bower & Brewster circus held forth. And Jack often used it, taking
with him some of his boy friends, and renewing acquaintance with
the performers. But there was no such attraction as a clown in an
imitation flying machine, though Sam Kyle and his fellows cut up
some queer antics in the ring.
But if Jack ever felt any desire to go back to the circus life, he never
told any one about it, for he had higher ambitions after that than to
don a multi-colored suit and daub his face over with red and white
paint.
THE END
 The Webster Series
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 TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
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*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JACK THE
RUNAWAY; OR, ON THE ROAD WITH A CIRCUS ***

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