The Yale man looked up from the paper.
“Perfectly true,” he said. “She is alive now. I telephoned to Mrs. Hanlon this evening and found that she was alive, though in a very critical condition.”
The other took the paper and wrote again.
“Will she die?”
“I don’t know,” Merriwell said simply, as he read the question.
Jim Hanlon seemed to be in an agony of indecision. His hands clenched and unclenched and the slender, brown fingers twitching nervously. All the time his glittering black eyes were fixed fiercely on the Yale man’s face as if he were trying to plumb the depths of the other’s soul and read his very thoughts. Finally he reached out, took the paper from Merriwell’s hand, scrawled a sentence and gave it back again.
“If you didn’t run over her, who did?” was what Dick read.
As he raised his eyes again to Hanlon’s face, the Yale man felt a thrill of pity go through him at the thought of what this fellow must be suffering. He had also a distinct feeling of admiration for the manner in which the mute was persevering in the face of all obstacles in his search for the man who had been responsible for his little sister’s injuries.
Whether Dick approved of the other’s primitive method of taking the law into his own hands was another matter. Though the Yale man’s temper was under perfect control, it was still alive, and there had been a time when he might have done just what this dumb boy was trying to do. It was not strange, then, that there should be a certain bond of sympathy between the two.
“I am not sure,” he said, handing the paper back to Hanlon. “I have been trying all day to find out.”