Maxwell, being a reasonably wealthy mine owner, as well as the superintendent of the railroad, kept two cars; a runabout and a big touring-machine which, in the absence of his family, were both housed in a down-town garage. In the big car the twenty-mile drive over the Topaz Lake pike was quickly made.
Just before they came to the bridge over the Gloria, they passed an auto with two men in it going toward town. Oddly enough, as it seemed, the in-bound car gave them a wide berth, steering almost into the ditch at the passing, and speeding up to a racing clip as soon as the ditched machine had been yanked back into the roadway. Tarbell, who was driving the Maxwell car, stopped, jumped out, and examined the tracks of the other car by the help of a lighted match.
“That’s them,” he said laconically, when he resumed the steering-wheel. “That was the same car. It’s got a set o’ them new-fangled tires with creepers on ’em.”
“Hurry!” snapped Maxwell. “We don’t know what they’ve been doing to Stillings and Billy, this time.”
Happily they soon found that the evening visit of the two unknown men to the abandoned prospect shaft had been charitable rather than malevolent. Stillings, who was the first of the two captives to be hauled out of the dark pit on the mountain side, told them that another basket of food had just been lowered by a string into the shaft. And when Starbuck came up he brought the basket with him.
Singularly enough, the two rescued ones had no explanation to offer; or, at least, none that served to explain anything. It transpired that they had dined together in the town house of the club the evening before, and had afterward gone to the theatre together. After the play they had taken a taxi to go to Stillings’s house in the suburbs to sleep. An auto had followed them, and when they had dismissed the taxi they had been set upon by a number of masked men who tumbled out of the pursuing car. Since they had no weapons, they were quickly overpowered, thrown into the car, carried off to the mountains, and dumped into the prospect hole, the rope by which they had been lowered being thrown in after them. That was all.
“And you don’t know what it was for?” asked Sprague, when they were rolling evenly back to the city with Starbuck at the steering-wheel.
“No more than you do,” was the lawyer’s answer. “Billy and I have speculated over it all day—having no other way of amusing ourselves—and it’s a perfectly blind trail. Billy says he knows I must have been the one they were after, and I say he must have been the one. You can take your choice.”
At the club town house the two rescued ones were set down, and Tarbell was released to go and get his well-earned rest after the twenty-four-hour task of shadow work.
“Get yourself in shape to go on an advisory committee with us as soon as you can, Robert,” was Sprague’s injunction to the attorney; and then Maxwell drove down to the railroad building, and the expert was with him when he went up to the despatcher’s office.