"You let me go! It wasn't my fault!" stormed Glutts.
By this time the Rovers had come up. Bill Glutts looked the picture of despair, with blood flowing from several cuts on his face and on one hand.
"Where is Werner?" questioned Jack quickly.
"There he goes!" exclaimed Randy. "Come on after him before he gets away."
"Some one had better stay here and see that Glutts doesn't get away," suggested Fred.
"All right, Fred, you and Andy stay here until we get back," answered Randy, and then he sped off after Jack, who was already running at his best rate of speed in the direction Gabe Werner had taken.
By this time Werner was thoroughly scared. He knew that he was liable to arrest for smashing the bric-a-brac stand, and he had no desire to fall into the clutches of the Rovers, feeling instinctively that they might pummel him thoroughly before handing him over to the authorities. Besides that, he remembered that they might hold him to account for the pepper incident.
He had turned down a side street where there were a number of tenements. He dove through an open doorway and ran the length of the hall, coming out of the building at the rear. Here there was a small yard surrounded by a board fence. He leaped the fence with ease, and then dove into the back end of another tenement and out at the front, and soon lost himself in a crowd on the other street.
Jack and Randy hunted around for fully a quarter of an hour, and were then compelled to give up the chase.
"It's too bad," declared the oldest Rover boy, "but it can't be helped. Let us go back and see what they have done with Glutts."