Jim gave no answer. His eyes were growing accustomed to the darkness, and a flashing light off in the distance made him think that he might be able to guess where he was. Jim had never been to Boston before, but he knew the Massachusetts coast well, from a number of cruises he had made in those waters, and he thought that the lighthouse would soon give him a clew. Moreover, a wild suspicion was forming in his mind, and with it a plan, daring, but still offering a chance to escape, and reach Cambridge in time to justify Dick Merriwell’s faith in him, and the hopes of his fellow students at Yale.
CHAPTER XII
TWO DESPERATE CHANCES.
Bill Brady, when he emerged from the drug store and saw no sign of the taxicab in which he had left his pitcher, thought at first that Jim had played a joke on him by ordering the driver to take him back at once to the hotel. He had looked around for a few minutes, and had then, with a promise to himself to exact due vengeance, taken another cab, and gone back himself. But when he arrived, he found that Jim had not returned. He waited a little while, and then, beginning to be vaguely alarmed, sought Dick Merriwell, and told him what had happened.
As hour after hour passed without a sign of Jim, the coach and the catcher became deeply worried. All their efforts to trace the missing pitcher were in vain. They consulted the police, but there had been no report of any accident that might account for his disappearance, and a search of all the hospitals failed to reveal the presence as a patient of any one at all like Jim.
Brady, naturally enough, had paid no particular attention of the number of the cab, and there was thus no way of tracing it.
After an almost sleepless night, Dick Merriwell and Brady resumed their search in the morning. They had said nothing to the other players of Jim’s strange absence, for Merriwell saw no need of worrying them, and thus reducing their efficiency for the game when they could not possibly do anything to bring Jim back. But, after breakfast, when Jim was still missing, Dick had to take some of them, at least, into his confidence. If Jim did not return, Bob Gray would have to do the pitching, and Dick, without going into details, told the senior to be prepared, in an emergency, to go into the box.
When it was time to start for Cambridge, Jim was still missing, and by that time the whole team, surprised and disturbed, knew that for some reason he was not along. Dick Merriwell was pestered on all sides with questions.
“I think that Phillips will report at the field in time for the game,” he said, in reply to all the questions that were showered upon him. “In any case, we’re going to play the game, and I want you fellows to go in there determined to win, with him or without him.”
A great crowd had turned out for the game. The city of Boston is loyal to Harvard teams always. But there were a great many old Yale men in business there, who were ready to turn out to cheer for the blue. Moreover, every Yale student who could scrape together the railroad fare, had come on to Boston to see the game. The result was that the biggest crowd the Yale team had seen all season was in the stand when it was time for the two teams to begin their final practice. Jim Phillips was still missing, and Gray and Taylor warmed up as the Yale battery, while Bill Brady, in his uniform, sat dejectedly on the bench beside Dick Merriwell, who blamed himself bitterly for not having taken precautions to prevent such a thing.