At that Lanky smiled.
“I don’t know whether you’re just kidding or not, Frank,” he said; “but I’d just made up my mind to do that same, right now—follow the caravan, and try to get another glance at that face.”
“Well, you do rush things to beat the band!” ejaculated Bones. “We came out on this run to see how the cut-off might be, and to get a point on what we could do over the course; but seems to me running has been about the last on the list with the lot of us to-day. There was that adventure with the bull; and now here’s Lanky gone daffy over the brown face of a baby girl, that just happened to look sad at him after getting a spanking from her ma! Frank, do we go with him, or head off for ourselves right here?”
“Oh, suit yourselves, fellows!” said Lanky, quickly, for he was very touchy, and ready to resent anything like a favor grudgingly bestowed. “Just leave me alone and I’ll show up later.”
Frank, however, realized that somehow his chum was worked up over the matter more than he could remember having seen him for a long time. Perhaps it was the fact that his nerves had been shaken during his recent affair with the bull. Then again, there might be a slight possibility that Lanky was right with regard to the child.
“Oh, that’s all right, Lanky!” he remarked, soothingly. “I’m going where you lead, and if Bones objects he knows what he can do. Not that I take much stock in your kidnapping idea, because such things happen only once in a long time nowadays.”
“But you admit, Frank, that it could be; don’t you?” demanded the other, not at all shaken in his belief.
“Well, yes, there might be about one chance in a hundred, Lanky,” Frank replied.
“And I’m taking the hundredth chance,” said the other, doggedly, as he started off after the gypsy caravan, which had vanished entirely from view around a bend in the road while the three runners were holding this short conversation among themselves.
They sighted it again as soon as they had turned the curve in the road. As if by mutual consent Frank and Bones had fallen back, and allowed Lanky to have the post of honor in the van.