“And I’ll be grub-staked!” added Harvey, that seeming to be a favorite expression of his.
“Oh, you took me for a hold-up man!” exclaimed the conductor, a note of relief in his voice. “And I did the same by you. But something happened. Someone pulled the emergency air brake cord, and stopped the train almost within a length. Did any one here do it? And what for?”
“No one that we saw,” replied Jerry. “But something has evidently happened. One of our party—the head of it I may say,” he added, thinking to carry out the plan they had adopted—“Professor Snodgrass—is missing. I just discovered that he was gone when the train was pulled up. We fear he may have fallen off in going from one car to another.”
“That is hardly possible,” said the conductor. “This is a vestibuled train, and it is as safe to go from one car to another as it is to walk the length of a coach. He could not have fallen off.”
“Then where is he?” asked Ned, and the boys looked at one another in alarm. At that moment, from the rear end of the car they were in, came a voice crying:
“I have it! Oh, I have you my little beauty! You tried to get away from me, but I have you!”
“The professor!” cried Ned, Bob and Jerry, in a chorus.
They made a rush in the direction of the voice, and, a moment later, they saw their eccentric friend perched high up in a corner of the outer vestibule of the parlor car. He was supporting himself by standing on some small iron projection, his head was well up under the “hood” of the car, and, while clinging with one hand to the emergency air brake cord, with the other he clutched his prize.
“Is—is that you, Professor?” asked Jerry, hardly knowing what he was saying.