We got into the rig and started for home, stirred up quite a bit and excited over our adventure. It was Mark that began showing us his pockets full of sawdust. Said he’d had presence of mind enough to get a cargo of gold even when we was being besieged and fighting for our lives against awful odds. The rest of us were sorry we hadn’t got some treasure, too.
“The old Ku Klux Klan showed it was worth somethin’ that time,” says Binney; and we all agreed with him.
Mark told us about a lot of famous escapes out of history, and we sized them up and compared them with ours; and if we hadn’t been about as smart as any of them, then I don’t know what I’m talking about! Ours was as good a scheme as any Mark had to tell about.
We drove along, making believe we were pursued and that the horse was galloping madly, which was a kind of a joke, because that animal couldn’t have gone fast enough to break the law on the sign over the bridge about riding or driving across faster than a walk. We stood ready with our sling-shots to sell our lives dear, and, considering everything, we were having as much fun as I’ve had for a long time.
We kept looking along the river-bank hoping to catch sight of Sammy, but he must have gone farther up, because we didn’t see any trace of him. There was no telling how far he had gone; ten or fifteen miles wasn’t anything to him at all, and sometimes he’d be away as much as a week. When he came back he’d tell us about hunting or fishing in a lake or woods maybe fifty miles off. I never saw his beat for walking—all day and all night he could keep it up without getting tired, and as for getting lost or wondering which was the right way to go, why, it never bothered him at all. He was like one of those pigeons that carry letters; take him where you wanted to and he always knew the way to start for home.
Maybe we had gone a mile when we saw a cloud of dust ahead that had a horse and buggy in the middle of it driving faster than farmers usually do when they’re coming home from town. At first we thought maybe it was the doctor on a hurry call but the horse wasn’t gray, so we knew it couldn’t be him. In a few minutes the rig was close enough so we could see the man driving, and I like to have fallen out of our carriage, for it was nobody in the world but that Henry C. Batten who was sneaking around the engine-room the day before. There he was, as big as life, and we thought sure he had gone back to Pittsburg. He went by in a flash without even looking at us.
“Well,” I said to Mark, “what d’you think of that?”
“I think,” said Mark, frowning a little, “that we’re goin’ to have to keep our eyes open. If that feller’s hangin’ around after dad’s turbine, now’s when he’ll try to git it—with dad away.”
“Jinks!” he says in a minute, slapping his knee. “That name on that post-box was Willis. He’s drivin’ that way. The engineer’s name was Willis—in Mr. Whiteley’s place, I mean—and he’s in cahoots with this Batten. Fellers, he’s a goin’ to that place we just left.”
It sounded likely, the way Mark reasoned it out.