This was done; and the chums purchased a lock which could be placed on the gear shift, so that it would be impossible to start the car without unlocking the device or smashing it.
“By the turn of affairs, we’ve got to watch out for more than one kind of enemy,” announced Roger, when the search for clues to the mysterious disappearance of the two girls had again been resumed.
“I’ve got a new idea, Roger,” answered our hero slowly. “I may be mistaken, but somehow it strikes me that it would pay us to take a look around Chesleyville before we go farther. If that fellow was connected in any way with the kidnapping of Jessie and Laura, the girls may be held somewhere in this neighborhood.”
“That idea strikes me as a good one, Dave. Let us make a number of inquiries and find out if the gypsies were in this vicinity.”
The plan was carried out, the two youths spending the best part of a couple of hours both in the town and on the outskirts. The search in that vicinity, however, proved fruitless, and once again they set off on their trip along the line of the railroad.
Before lunch time they had stopped at three more places, and at one of them gained the information that several gypsies had been seen in that vicinity about two weeks before. They had been men, and where they had gone nobody seemed to know.
Late that afternoon found the chums at a place known as Fallon’s Crossing. Here a small sideline crossed the main railroad, and here were located a switch shanty and a small freight yard. At this point it was said that the train which had carried Laura and Jessie had stopped for fully fifteen minutes, to let the hot box cool off and also to allow another train to pass. Just beyond Fallon’s Crossing was the thriving town of Crandall, at which the train was scheduled to make a regular stop.
The switchman at the shanty could tell them nothing more than that the train had stopped. He said a number of people had gotten off to pick some wildflowers that grew by the roadside, and then re-entered the train. Who the people had been, he could not remember.
There was a man hanging around the freight yard who had also been present on the day when the train had stopped, and he vouchsafed the information that when the people on the train had learned that the stop would be for some time a number had tramped up the tracks to the town, to get on again when the train arrived at the regular station.
“There were at least eight or ten people did that,” said the freight-yard man; “but who they were I do not know.”