“O, thank goodness!” Gertrude exclaimed. “Now the old man can stop worrying.”
Mr. Wiggin held the lantern up, his round face glowing. “It sure was a lucky thing that Bob, here, wanted to look at those tracks,” he said. “No telling but what that robber might have come back in the night, knowing where he had dropped it.”
“Do hurry in, Mr. Wiggin, and give it to old Mr. Bartlett,” Doris begged, and if there was an unusual tenseness in her voice, none of the others noticed it. Bob glanced meaningly in her direction as he sat beside his Rose, and Doris, who had been silent before that, suddenly became the life of the party. “Oh, boys, please change your minds about taking us right home,” she pleaded. “We girls want to turn up the wood road just a little distance.”
“Why, Doris Drexel,” Betty Byrd cried in evident alarm, “what a wild suggestion! Why in the world should we want to go up the very road where the robbery took place!”
“That’s what I’d like to know!” Bertha began, then she remembered that Doris’ suggestion was merely the carrying out of their plan to try to discover if the boys of the “C. D. C.” held their secret meetings in the old Welsley “haunted” house. If the boys were willing to take the girls through the old ruin, it would mean that it was not their meeting place.
“Oh, yes—do let’s go!” Bertha then seconded.
“All right,” Jack sang out willingly. “I’ll have to back up a little. We’ve passed the wood road.”
“O, girls,” Merry gave Doris and Bertha a wink of understanding, “let’s go there some other time. I think we’ve given our guests of honor enough thrills for tonight.”
To which Geraldine heartily agreed, and so the horses were turned out upon the highway. When the girls had been left at their homes, the boys laughed and shouted as though at a good joke. The girls would indeed have been mystified if they had heard them.