THE CHASE
"I--I--don't know what we're running after him for!" gasped Mollie. "We
haven't got a chance--in the world--of catching--him."
"Look," panted Betty, pointing to a machine at the side of the road with a
man in chauffeur's uniform sitting behind the wheel, "maybe we can get
him! Quick--"
Betty's action always followed hard upon the heels of impulse, and before
any of the girls had time to realize what she was going to do she had
darted across the road, had said a few excited words, and was tumbling
into the tonneau.
Without stopping to question, the girls followed, jumping in beside her,
and the chauffeur, after one surprised look, touched his cap and the
machine leapt forward like a wild thing.
Mollie had time, even in her excitement, to wonder how Betty had managed
it.
"I think she hypnotizes them," she muttered to herself.
And all Betty had really said to the man was, "Please follow that
motorcyclist! We mustn't lose sight of him!" and the man, obeying that
impulse for adventure that is in all of us, had complied.
The motorcyclist had sped around the corner and darted into one of the
side streets. A few minutes later the chauffeur turned the same corner
with a recklessness that made them gasp, turned it just in time to see
their quarry disappearing round another corner.
"Gosh, that fellow can coax some speed out of that machine of his!" cried
the man at the wheel. "But if you young ladies don't mind a little danger,
we may catch him yet."
"Oh, please don't think about us," cried Betty, her hands clutching the
back of the seat, her eyes straining after the flying speck that seemed to
be growing smaller every second. "Oh, we must catch him,--we must! It
would be awful to lose him now!"
"Well, here goes," responded the man behind the wheel, and under his
skillful touch the machine leapt forward like a spirited horse at the
touch of the lash.
"That's it, that's it!" cried Mollie, almost beside herself with
excitement. "Just hear that engine purr! He can't get away from us now!"
"Oh, if we could only take him back to Camp Liberty with us!"
"I thought so," said the chauffeur, and even in their excitement they had
time to look in surprise at his back.
"Wh-what did you think?" stammered Betty.
"That you were the girls up at the Hostess House that everybody is talking
about," he told her, while the girls fairly gasped with surprise at this
proof of their widespread fame. "That's why I didn't ask questions but
just did as I was told," he added. And somehow they knew, though they
could not see his face, that he was grinning. "You see, I'd always heard
that you most always got what you set out to get, and I didn't waste time
arguin'," he finished.
The girls laughed hysterically, and Betty said, with a funny little
inflection:
"Sounds as if we were very strong-minded. But we don't care about that,"
she added, once more fixing her gaze anxiously on the road before them,
"if we can only catch that man."
"May I ask who he is, miss?" asked the man.
"He's--he's a--criminal!" returned Betty, her little fists clenched
fiercely.
"A criminal?" he repeated with interest. "May I ask what kind?"
"A murderer," cried Mollie fiercely, adding, as the man started and the
girls looked at her in surprise: "Well, he might just as well have been.
He didn't even stop to see whether he was or not, which is about the same
thing."
There was a sound from the front seat that sounded suspiciously like a
chuckle, but not being quite sure, the girls could do nothing whatever
about it.
"But look--he's getting away from us!" wailed Amy suddenly, and once more
all their attention was focused on the chase.
And, quite suddenly, while they watched, the motorcyclist disappeared from
view as if the earth had opened and swallowed him up.
A few seconds later, with a grinding of brakes, the car stopped at the
spot where he had disappeared, and the girls looked at one another
despairingly.
The path that he had taken seemed no more than a broad foot path through
the woods, so narrow that no machine could follow him, and of course there
was no chance of catching him on foot.
"He got away from us!" cried Grace, voicing a rather self-evident fact.
"I'm afraid so, miss," said the man, and he seemed so genuinely
disappointed that they looked at him gratefully. "The man must be rather
much of a dare-devil, your criminal," he added, eyeing the bumpy path
thoughtfully. "An ordinary rider wouldn't be able to go two yards along
that path without coming to grief."
"Do you know where this path leads to?" asked Betty, struck with a sudden
inspiration. "If there's another road we might circle round and head him
off."
"Sorry, miss," he said, "but the road that path leads to is nothing but a
wagon road, and we'd have to go several miles before we'd cross it. And
the chances are," he added, "that the fellow would double back upon
himself and we'd have the run for nothing."
Betty shook her head resignedly, for, hard as it was to relinquish the
man, all that the chauffeur had said was founded on hard common sense and
she could see there was no alternative.
"I guess you're right," she said at last, after a pause during which the
girls had looked at her hopefully. Betty so often found a way where no one
else could that they never completely gave up hope until she herself
relinquished it.
So now they sighed and climbed soberly back into the machine.
"Where to?" inquired the chauffeur, as he turned the car and headed back
the way they had come. "If you're going back to the camp," he suggested,
"I can take you there. Or anywhere you say."
"You've been awfully good," cried Betty, with real gratitude in her voice.
"But you don't have to take us away back to camp. If you will drop us at
the end of the road we can walk back." All this despite sundry vigorous
and desperate shakings of Grace's head and pantomimic pointings toward her
feet. At the conclusion of Betty's sentence she groaned, but brightened up
again at the chauffeur's response.
"It won't be any trouble," he said, "to take you all the way back to camp.
In fact"--a little shyly--"I'd like to."
"Then we'd be very, very glad to accept," said Betty cordially. "For we
have walked a long way and are rather tired."
At the gates of Camp Liberty they got out of the car, thanked the
chauffeur, and while they were hesitating whether or not to offer him
money for his trouble, the latter turned the car and, with a last lifting
of his cap and waving of his hand, was gone.
"Isn't he nice?" sighed Amy, as they started toward the Hostess House,
Grace limping a little and bringing up the rear. "Meeting a man like that
gives you new faith in human nature."
"Goodness, Will had better look out," chaffed Mollie, a little gleam of
humor shining through her weariness. "I always thought you had it in you
to run off with a chauffeur, Amy."
Before Amy had time to retort they saw a stalwart and familiar figure
swinging toward them and recognized Sergeant Mullins.
"Good afternoon," he called to them, with the smile that always so
surprisingly lighted up his usually grave face. "You look as if you had
had rather an exciting time of it."
"Oh, we did almost have such a beautiful adventure!" cried Mollie, her
eyes sparkling with the memory of it.
"And all we really got," said Grace gloomily, "were four pairs of sore
feet."
Sergeant Mullins laughed at her with the rest, then asked, with real
interest:
"But the adventure that you almost had,--would you mind telling me about
it?"
Whereupon Betty launched into a full and graphic account of the chase in
somebody else's automobile after an unknown criminal who, at the last
minute, had escaped in an apparently impossible manner.
"And that's all there is to it," she finished plaintively. "After all our
trouble and everything, we find ourselves just where we were before."
The sergeant looked very grave.
"The man was a cad," he said, "to knock down an old woman that way and
then not stop to see how badly she was hurt. I wish you could have won out
to-day. Could you give a good description of him?"
"Yes, I can," cried both Amy and Grace in the same breath, and thereupon
proceeded to do it without delay. At the description the sergeant's
interest grew and his face flushed with excitement.
When they had finished, Betty, who had been watching his face closely,
unable to restrain her curiosity longer, burst forth an eager question.
"Have you seen the man, Sergeant?"
"I think I have--often," he replied slowly, adding as they turned
incredulous eyes upon him. "If I'm not mistaken, this criminal of yours is
one of the most famous card sharpers of the day."