The schoolboy flared up through all his emotion.
“Why, I never saw you before this minute!”
“Well, I’ve had my eye on you, more or less, for a day or two.”
“Then why didn’t you wire before?” demanded Mr. Upton, quite ready to mask his own emotion with a little heat. “I didn’t get it till after nine o’clock—too late for the evening train—but I wasn’t going to waste three hours with a forty-horser eating its head off! So here I am, on my way to the address you gave.”
“It was plumb opposite Baumgartner’s. I mounted guard there the very night you left. He came out twenty minutes ago, and your boy after him!”
“But what does it all mean, Thrush? What on earth were you doing there, my dear boy?”
The notes of anger and affection were struck in ludicrously quick succession; but the first was repeated on the boy’s hang-dog admission that he had been hiding.
“Hiding, Tony?”
Thrush himself seemed surprised at the expression. “But at all events we found you better employed,” he said to Pocket, “and the sooner we all take up the chase again the more chance we shall have of laying this rascal by the heels.”
“Take it up, then!” snapped Mr. Upton. “Jump into the motor, and bring the brute to me when you’ve got him! I want to speak to my boy.”