CHAPTER THIRTEEN
TINKER MEETS HIS OLD NURSE
Tinker let the car rip on, the while he considered what he should do. He was excited, determined, he accepted readily enough the responsibility which had fallen upon him, but he was hardly happy. He could see no hope of rescuing Dorothy and Elsie by himself, even if he caught the carriage; and since he reckoned that it would take his father two or three hours to turn the Riviera upside down, and extricate himself and Mr. Rainer from the extremely neat and effective trap into which they had fallen, he could look for no help from them till far into the night. For a while he suffered from the sense that he had bitten off, or rather had had thrust into his mouth, more than he could chew. Then of a sudden he saw that the really important thing, the dogging the kidnappers, was in his power, and he regained his cheerfulness.
He drove on the car at full speed for ten miles, and inquired of a peasant walking beside a cart loaded with bags of grain, if he had seen the carriage. The peasant had seen it; he was vague as to how long ago, and how far away, but Tinker was sure that he had seen it. Accordingly, he drove on the car at full speed again. In this way, going at full speed, and now and again slowing down to inquire, he got over a good many miles. He was frightened when he went through a town lest the police should try to stop him, but it seemed that they had received no such instructions from Ventimiglia. All the while he was drawing nearer the carriage, for all that, somewhere or other, it had plainly changed horses.
At last he made up his mind that he would overtake it in the next seven miles; and he bucketed the car along for all she was worth. At the end of the seven miles he had not overtaken it, nor was there any appearance of it on the road before him, a level stretch of two miles. However, he ran on another five miles, and there was no sign of it, nor had anyone he passed or met, seen it. Plainly he had overshot it.
He turned the car, and came back, stopping to examine branch roads for its wheel-tracks, losing the ground he had made up. Some seven miles back, he came to a road leading to a great gap in the hills. A little girl was feeding a few lean sheep at the corner of it. No: she had seen no carriage; she had only been here a little while: the road ran up to Camporossa. Tinker considered it, and it invited his search. It went high into the hills, and he saw little towns here and there on their sides. He sent the car slowly down it. For seventy yards the roadway was hard, or stony; then came a patch of dust, smooth and unmarked by a wheel-track. Any vehicle going along the road must have passed over it, and a wave of disappointment submerged Tinker's spirit; the road had seemed so very much the right one. He stopped the car, and stared blankly at the patch of dust. Suddenly his quick eye caught a curious marking on its surface. He jumped down, and bent over it: sure enough, the patch had been brushed and smoothed with a bough.
He hurried the car back to the corner of the road, and by entreaties, persuasion, cajoling, a five-franc piece, and even—great concession!—a kiss, he wrung from the little shepherdess a promise that she would wait till dark if need were, stop every motor-car that came from the direction of the frontier, and say, "The kidnappers have gone up this road." He was assured that his father would borrow or hire a motorcar, and follow in it.
Then he turned the car for Camporossa. Three hundred yards up the road he came to another patch of dust, and saw the wheel-tracks of the carriage deep and plain. He sent along the car as hard as he dared, for, as the road grew steeper along the hillside, it grew stonier and stonier, thanks to its serving, like most Italian hill roads, as a watercourse to carry off the rain from the hills. A very slow and painful jolting brought him among the olive groves of Camporossa and into that little town.
He stopped before the little Inn, and was served with milk and bread and fruit. As he ate and drank, he was all affability and information to the group of the curious who gathered round the car. He was an English boy; his family had gone on in front in a carriage, and he was following them in the car. He learned at once that the carriage had gone on to Dolceacqua, and was less than an hour ahead.
He paid for his food and milk, and without delay sent the car up the steep hillside. He had to nurse and coax it up the steepest parts. After another long jolting he reached Dolceacqua, vexed all the time by the knowledge that the carriage was going as fast as he over such roads. The magnificent view of the Mediterranean from the rose-gardens of Dolceacqua afforded him no pleasure at all; it made only too clear to him the risk he would run, if he recovered Dorothy and Elsie and had to descend that steep at any pace. At Dolceacqua he learned that the carriage was little more than half an hour ahead, on the road to Islabona. He was pleased to hear that, for all the badness of the road, he had gained upon it: plainly the horses were tiring.