Suddenly he heard something that made him renew his beating on the door and his useless shouting. There was a creaking, groaning sound that he knew only too well, and in a moment his worst fears were confirmed. The train was beginning to move, and he was still locked in.
Fury succeeded to his amusement at the joke he had supposed to be intended. They were carrying it too far. Then he was almost panic-stricken. He had heard of men, locked in freight cars, who had traveled hundreds of miles before being discovered, with neither food nor water, and even of some who had been dead when found. And this car, as he knew, was being sent back West. Being empty, it would move slowly, and no one was likely to open it until the end of the trip. He realized suddenly the full danger of his position.
CHAPTER XXII
THE FINGER PRINTS.
When Dick Merriwell, walking with big Bill Brady, and a little ahead of the rest of the team, arrived at the station, it was to find Watson, with a white face, terrified, and scarcely able to talk. Jim Phillips had suddenly disappeared, he told them, trembling, and he could make no guess at what had happened. He told of the cry they had heard, and of how they had separated in the effort to find out whence it had come. After that, he could tell nothing of any value.
He had failed to find any trace of a crying child, and, turning back to look for Jim, had seen no sign of him. None of the men about the big freight train had seen the pitcher. They could give no help, although, up to the very moment when their train had started, they had helped Watson to search for his friend. But the search had been in vain.
Dick and Brady looked at one another in great concern. It was plain that something very serious had happened to Jim. They wasted half of a precious hour in looking for him, telephoning to his rooms, and to every other place in New Haven where he could possibly have gone, and, when the baseball men had all arrived, Dick told them to go on to the city in charge of Tom Sherman, promising to come down himself later on, with Brady and Phillips. He did not want the players to know that there was any reason for anxiety as to Phillips.
With Watson, the coach and the big catcher searched all around the station. They could find no one who had seen Jim. Suddenly Dick had an inspiration.
“The freight train!” he cried. “He must have got locked in one of the cars.”
He turned and raced for the office of the freight agent. That official could give them only very cold comfort, however. He promised to do all he could, but he said that to look for a man locked in one of the cars of that train would be like looking for a needle in a haystack, since it had been broken up at Bridgeport, and the cars scattered into a dozen different trains made up there for dispatch to points all over the country. But he promised to make the wires burn with messages, and to let them know if he heard anything likely to be of value.