“Skip back and aboard the boat,” the young captain directed, hurriedly. “Don’t tell a soul, except Joe Dawson, what you’ve been doing, and don’t go up into town away from the boat.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” nodded Hank, understandingly. “But don’t stay to watch me out of sight, or your man may skip off in that auto with his goggles friend.”
The advice was good. Keeping off the road, crouching low behind the bushes that fringed the highway, Halstead hastened forward as noiselessly as he could travel. After going a quarter of a mile he heard the quiet running of an automobile engine.
“Whoever has that car wants to be ready to start on the instant without even having to wait to crank up,” throbbed the young skipper, moving more stealthily than before. Instantly, too, he became more excited, for now he could hear the low hum of voices in conversation.
The noise of the automobile’s engine guided the young motor boat captain better than any other sound could have done. Crawling between the bushes, he came, at last, to a point directly opposite the auto at the roadside, and barely more than a score of feet away. Halstead crawled to this spot and lay there, securely hidden.
“You’ve done as well as you could, Ellis, no doubt,” a man’s voice was saying.
“I’m sure of that, Mr. Bolton,” replied the young man. “I’ve made those New York reporters suspicious. I’ve done the trick so strongly, in fact, that everyone of them will send his paper a story that will make Wall Street jump in the morning. Even if any of the reporters suspect that Delavan may be alive, they’ll give some space in their papers to the hint of remorse and suicide. P. & Y. ought to fall at twenty points when the Stock Exchange opens in the morning.”
“It will,” declared the man addressed as Bolton. “But I hope it will drop even more than that. The lower P. & Y. goes, Ellis, the better it will be for me. I want that railroad, and I’m going to get it!”
“Oh, you are, are you?” thought listening Tom Halstead, deeply interested.
“But I’m certain you’ll have to get Delavan to a safer place, Mr. Bolton,” continued Ellis, earnestly. “I’m afraid there’ll be a big search for him. You know Moddridge still has a goodish bit of money that’s not tied up in his new deals.”