“Let’s see if we kin follow the wagon tracks,” he said, and got a lantern out of the shop.
It wouldn’t be so hard to do at that time of the night, because there weren’t any other wagons driving around, and the wheels of this one would be the last wherever it went. Besides, it had rained a little earlier in the night, and the dust in the roads was pasty.
We followed the tracks down the alley a couple of blocks; then they turned, and Mark muttered that he thought so.
“Thought what?” I said.
“That they’d turn this way—toward the river.”
“Why?”
“Because,” he said, “that’s where the Willis farm is.”
He told me as we walked along what he’d reasoned out. From the minute the turbine had been taken he began thinking and thinking the way he always does and putting two and two together. At last he got it into his head that he knew where the men were taking his father’s engine. First, there was Henry C. Batten driving on the road toward the Willis farm; second, Willis was the father to the engineer who had sneaked Batten in to see if the turbine worked; third, old Mr. Willis acted more skittish than ordinary when we came around, and, says Mark, that showed he had a guilty conscience; and last, and what Mark called the clincher of the whole thing, was that room in the farmhouse all fixed up with drawing-tools and tables just waiting for somebody to come in and set to work. I thought it over, and it looked to me as though he’d argued it out pretty straight.
“I guess,” I says, “the place to look for the engine is out at Willis’s.”
We followed the wagon tracks quite a ways farther just to make sure, and then turned back for home. It was beginning to get kind of pink in the east when I scrambled up to my room again and rolled into bed. I’d promised Mark to meet him early in the morning to see what we’d do.