“Or me,” put in Sammy, with confidence.
“Say! you two give me a pain,” cried Neale, and refused to talk about it any further.
They made a fine run that day, getting on good roads again, and they spent the night with friends of Mrs. Heard’s who had been on the lookout for them for two days. A letter was waiting for the chaperone from her nephew, stating that the police were looking for Saleratus Joe and another man in connection with the disappearance of the Maybrouke runabout, and that the information she had sent might aid in the arrest of the automobile thieves.
“Well,” said Agnes, “of course I hope the police catch them; but it would be fun if we could bring about their arrest and find the machine, too, Neale.”
“Don’t let it worry you, Aggie,” he advised. “There isn’t any reward offered, so you’d have your work for your pains.”
Just the same, neither of them forgot the matter, and it was a topic of conversation between them, now and then, throughout the entire tour.
They went on as far as Fort Kritchton, and spent the week-end at the Monolith Hotel there, to which their trunks had been forwarded. The car needed some slight repairs, and the girls found pleasant friends. This point was to be the farthest they expected to travel from Milton.
Neale found a party of boys camping up in the woods above the hotel, and he enjoyed himself, too; but he had to take Sammy along with him most of the time, and he declared to Agnes that if he ever went anywhere again and had his choice of taking Sammy or a flea, he would choose the flea!
“You have no more idea of where to find him from one moment to another than a flea,” growled the older boy. “I’m coming to the old bachelor’s belief in the treatment and bringing up of boys.”
“What is that?” asked the amused Agnes, who had had her own experiences with Sammy Pinkney.