"I don't see why he should be, for if I understand the situation, his employer would not dare discharge him," continued Roy. "For some reason or other Willis made up his mind that the only thing he could do was to get rid of me; he was afraid to hire Tony and Bob to take me aboard that ship and leave me there, for that would give them a hold upon him; so he thought the best way was to get rid of the whole of us in a lump. I will say this much for Willis: he came pretty near doing it. I felt tolerable mad at Tony and Bob when you fellows suggested that they had been hired to have me kidnapped, and here I've gone and divided my last dollar with them."
"And we felt just as angry at Rowe for getting you into a scrape, and yet we are ready to stand by him," said Joe. "On the whole, I am satisfied with what we have done on this trip."
I thought he had reason to be. There was no one along the route who knew what Joe had done to avert that railroad disaster, but the folks at home had been posted before this time. On the day they left Plymouth Arthur and Roy mailed the full details of Joe's "Wild Ride," but the latter knew nothing of it until a week had passed, and they stopped for the night at a railway station where they found their trunks and a package of mail waiting for them. When Joe glanced at his mother's letter beginning: "My dear boy, how could you do it? I am frightened every time I think of it," and the first line of Uncle Joe's, which ran: "I am proud of my brave namesake. You have covered yourself with glory enough for one summer, and had better come home and relieve your mother's anxiety," he knew just what had been going on, and congratulated himself on having escaped return orders until his face was toward Mount Airy. All he said to his friends was:
"You fellows spread ink a trifle too freely while we were in Plymouth. If I had suspected it, I would have dropped the pair of you over the end of the pier like a couple of kittens."
"Perhaps that wouldn't have been so easy, either," replied Arthur. "More than twenty days' steady wheeling has brought us a tolerable muscle, I want you to remember. But what's the odds? It was bound to come out, and Roy and I kept still about it until we were homeward bound. When you write all you've got to do is to tell Uncle Joe we're coming."
Joe wrote that very night, and his letter contained a complete history of Roy's doings in New London harbor, and told how Arthur had come near getting them into serious trouble by shooting Matt Coyle's watch-dogs. He omitted nothing, and when he finished, he flattered himself that he had described the thing in language so graphic that Roy and Arthur would be invited to expedite their return.
The next time they came up with their letters, they also found papers containing some surprising as well as gratifying intelligence. Every man in the Buster band, including Matt Coyle and his gang of train-wreckers, had been arrested and put under lock and key. Acting upon the advice given him by the young wheelmen, Mr. Holmes had gone to New London and identified his property; that is, the implements that had been used to force that big rock from its bed and roll it upon the track. It was by his suggestion (which in the first place came from one of our three friends, as you will remember) that a couple of officers, disguised as tramp hunters, came to Glen's Falls and proceeded to "spot" every man they wanted. More strange tramps came in at intervals, and when the officers, for that was what they really were, were nearly equal in number to the law-breakers, they "corralled the whole business and ran them in." To quote from Roy Sheldon, who was so highly excited that he wanted to yell, it was a "pretty slick scheme," and by the time Matt was through serving the sentence that would surely be passed upon him, they would no longer stand in any fear of him, for they would be big enough to punch his head if he didn't let them alone.
"But I am really afraid our friend Bigden will see fun now," said Roy, in conclusion. "If Matt gets half a chance he will tell all he knows."
"I don't believe the things he did in the Indian Lake country will be brought against him," said Joe. "He'll come in for trying to wreck the train; and by the time he has been punished for that, he won't want to get into any more scrapes."