“Ah!” cried Bial Keene. “I see you have your birds, Merriwell.”
CHAPTER XXVI.
BOUND FOR FARDALE.
“Well, Abe,” said Captain Wiley, as the train on which they were traveling approached Fardale, “it strikes my acute perception that we must be drawing near our goal. This gang of salubrious young bloods in the car are evidently going to Fardale. However, by their appearance to my optical vision and from the conversation that is trickling from their lips, and tickling the tympanum of my ears, I am led to infer that they are members of a baseball team, together with a number of enthusiastic rooters. It strikes me that there will be a little baseball doing in Fardale this afternoon, on which occasion we will take in the sport, my boy—we will take in the sport. There will be but one drawback. Little Walter will have to sit still and see others perambulate over the diamond and swat the ball on the trade-mark.”
“Fardale!” exclaimed the hunchback, his eyes glowing. “I have heard so much about it! And Dick is there!”
“Yes, beyond question we shall encounter Richard Merriwell at Fardale. It will be a surprise to him, Abe. I know that he will palpitate with joy when he beholds our beaming countenances.”
“And Frank is coming soon?”
“As soon as he can. He said it was possible he might arrive almost as soon as we did. I have in a secret chamber of my cranium a conviction that Frank Merriwell himself will soon again be seen upon the baseball field. Abe, he is a wiz! He is the greatest pitcher this grand and glorious country has ever produced. When he sends the sphere whirling through the atmosphere and causes it to cut curious capers, the batter who faces him invariably hits nothing solider than the empty ozone.”
“Frank has been kind to me,” murmured Abe. “But I did fear I might never see him again when those men seized me and carried me away in Kansas City.”
“There was where Little Walter got in his fine work. I trailed them to their lair and then sicked Merry on them. It was a fine piece of business he did. There was but one fizzle to the affair. The gent named Jarvis, who was at the bottom of the infamous plot, managed to escape. Either he or one of his tools in the house turned off the lights. In the darkness he shot Bill; but when the lights flared again luminously, he had vanished like a spook into thin air. With the assistance of Bial Keene, Frank is doing his best to again get track of Mr. Jarvis and to learn why you were kidnapped. He will do it, too, my boy; mark that!”
“It’s so different here in this part of the country,” said the hunchback, as he gazed from the car window at the flying landscape. “It doesn’t seem like the country I know. There are such fine houses and such big towns! I am afraid in the cities, cap’n. There are so many, many people. I didn’t think there could be half so many people in the whole world.”