“They are all nailed up, as you can see. Once we tried to pry one of them open, but the gypsies heard it, and stopped us.”
The two youths made a hasty inspection of the two rooms in which the girls were kept prisoners. Each apartment was about twelve feet square, and each contained a window which was now nailed down and had heavy slats of wood taken from the tumbled-down piazza nailed across the outside. The inner room, which contained the mattress already mentioned, had also a small clothing closet in it, and in this the girls had placed the few belongings which had been in Laura’s suit-case at the time they had been kidnapped.
“They took our handbags with our money away from us,” explained Jessie.
Of course the girls wanted to know how it was that Dave and Roger had gotten on the trail, and they listened eagerly to the story the chums had to tell.
“Oh, I knew you would come, Dave!” cried Jessie, with tears in her eyes. “I told Laura all along that you would leave Montana and come here just as soon as you heard of it;” and she clung tightly to our hero, while the look in her bedimmed eyes bespoke volumes.
“Yes, and I said Roger would come,” added Laura, with a warm look at the senator’s son.
“There’s one thing we can’t understand at all,” said Dave. “How was it that you left that train at Crandall, went to the hotel there, and then walked out on that country road to where the automobile was?”
“Oh, that was the awfulest trick that ever was played!” burst out Laura. “They must have planned it some days ahead, or they never could have done it.”
“Tell me,” broke in Roger suddenly, “wasn’t the driver of that car Nick Jasniff?”
“I think he was,” answered Dave’s sister. “We accused him of being Jasniff, but he denied it. Nevertheless, both of us feel rather certain that it is the same fellow who robbed Mr. Wadsworth’s factory.”