“No knowing when we’ll get a chance to eat again,” declared Nancy’s lively chum, who was enjoying to the full the opening of this strange campaign.
What should they first do when they reached the city? Would the hotel be open so early in the morning? Would Scorch be at the station to meet them?
And this question brought Nancy to another thought. Scorch had not been communicated with.
So she wrote a reply to his message, saying that she and Jennie, were coming to Cincinnati and were then on the train, and had the brakeman file it for sending at the first station beyond Clintondale at which the train stopped.
She addressed it to Scorch O’Brien’s home, believing that it might reach him more quickly in that way. She did not suppose that the red-haired youth would be allowed to remain at Garvan’s Hotel over night.
As it chanced, it was a very good thing Nancy Nelson sent this message, and addressed it as she did. But, of course, neither she nor Jennie Bruce suspected how important the matter was at the time.
And, within a few minutes, something else gripped the attention of the girls. They were discussing Jessie’s chicken sandwiches, “and other odds and ends,” when a man walked down the aisle of the rocking coach toward them.
“Oh, look, Nance!” whispered Jennie.
Nancy looked up. The towering figure of a man dressed in a gray suit, with hat and gloves to match, stopped suddenly beside them. It was Senator Montgomery, Grace Montgomery’s father.
“Hul-lo!” he muttered, evidently vastly surprised to see the girls in the train bound for Cincinnati.