“He is not a nice man at all, and I’m awfully glad he doesn’t live anywhere near our house.”
“I don’t know that any neighborhood would give Abe a bonus for moving into it,” chuckled Mr. Keech. “Well! I won’t detain you. I can scare him bad enough as it is. And thirty days in jail will do Abe a world of good. I won’t keep you folks as witnesses; you’ve had trouble enough.”
So the matter was settled very amicably, and the touring party from Milton hastened on to the Wayside Rose Inn, at Brampton, for breakfast.
“One thing we never thought about,” Agnes said to Neale, when they had bidden Sheriff Keech good-bye.
“What’s that?”
“Why, about Mr. Collinger’s car and that Joe Dawson fellow. My! what mean people we do manage to meet.”
“And a little while ago you were thinking what good folks we had met,” laughed Neale. “But you are mistaken, Aggie. I spoke to the sheriff about Saleratus Joe and his mate and the lost car. Nothing doing. I’ve asked everybody else we have talked with—the blacksmith and Luke Shepard and all—about that bunch.”
“Oh! have you, Neale?” cried Mrs. Heard. “And has nothing come of it?”
“Well, Mrs. Heard,” said the boy, “all trace of that car and those fellows seems to have ended right there at the Higgins’ farm—where the Gypsy king saw them for the last time. That’s the way it looks to me.”
“Oh, dear me!” sighed Agnes. “I wish you’d have let me hunt in that barn for the car.”