“Then we can’t take a policeman along for protection—I’m a tenderfoot, and all tenderfoots are nervous, you know. That’s too bad. And Mr. Harding isn’t here to let us have the backing of the county officers. Dear, dear! Are they very bad men out there, Archer?”
Tarbell grinned sheepishly, feeling sure that the big man was in some way making game of him.
“They’d eat you alive if they thought you was an officer headin’ a raid on ’em. Otherwise, I reckon they wouldn’t bite you none.”
“Well, I suppose we shall have to risk it—without the policeman,” said the expert with a good-natured laugh. “Perhaps we can persuade them that we are just ‘lookers,’” he suggested. And then: “I suppose you have your artillery with you?”
Tarbell nodded. “A couple o’ forty-fives. I’d hardly go huntin’ train-robbers without ’em.”
“Of course not. Suppose you divide up with Mr. Maxwell here, and then go and find us an auto; just the bare car; we’ll manage to drive it ourselves. And, Archer, get a good big one, with easy springs. If there is any one thing I dislike more than another it is to be jammed up in a little, hard-riding car. I need plenty of room. I guess I grew too much when I was a boy.”
The young man with the sober face went away, still more or less dazed; and Maxwell dropped the weapon that Tarbell had given him into the outside pocket of his top-coat.
“I am completely and totally in the dark as yet, Calvin,” he ventured. “Did you mean what you said when you told Tarbell just now that the muddle was cleared up?”
“I did, indeed. And it is as pretty a piece of off-hand plotting as I have ever come across, Dick. Don’t you see daylight by this time?”
“Not a ray. It may be just natural stupidity; or it may be only a bad case of rattle. I blew up and went to pieces when that wire came about Calmaine. Why, good heavens, think of it, Calvin! If the boy’s gone, those proxies are gone, too!”