“Oh, ho! A red runabout,” he murmured. “So you think he’s the gent we’re after?”
As Dick stepped in to examine the car more closely, his eyes fell upon a scrap of paper which lay on the ground close by one of the forward wheels. Picking it up, he saw that it was a torn piece of common brown wrapping paper, very much mussed and dirty. He was about to toss it aside when he happened to turn it over. The next instant his eyes widened with surprise.
“What the mischief is this, I wonder?” he said in a low tone.
Buckhart stepped forward and looked at it over the other’s shoulder.
“‘His name is Dick Merriwell’,” he read slowly. “Who’s been taking your name in vain, partner?”
Dick made no reply. He was busy trying to decipher the illiterate scrawl which preceded the one legible sentence the Texan had read. Slowly, word by word, he made it out.
“Somebody—run over—Amy—and—kill her,” he read at last.
“Amy—who is Amy?” he mused. “Why, that’s the little girl we picked up this morning—Amy Hanlon.”
He looked at the paper again, and then, like a ray of light, the solution flashed into his brain.
“Why, that dumb fellow—her brother—must have written this!” he exclaimed. “Clingwood said he had to do his talking on paper. But what on earth is my name here for? Wait a minute.”