"Oh, I guess we're no wizards at all! No, nothing like that! No wizards about us! Not at all!" chuckled Paul Jones in a perfect rapture of delight. "No, we're no wizards!"
And although Philip, William and David expressed themselves in somewhat different language, it was apparent that they, too, entertained pretty much the same opinion as the highly elated Mr. Jones with regard to their being "No wizards, at all," whatever that may signify.
Yet now that the Chosen Trio had been again outwitted and again left behind, temporarily at least, there remained the problem of keeping well beyond their sight and reach. To do this and to do it without permitting those persistent young gentlemen to bar the Thirty from entering the limits of Queensville was no small undertaking.
The town was of only a few thousand population, and even now when filled with strangers and with strange automobiles from the larger cities near by, it was apparent that at any moment the four friends appeared on the principal streets they might expect to meet the very persons they most wished to avoid.
MacLester emphatically declared himself in favor of letting the Trio "go hang." If they "wanted to tag along clear to the Ship woods," he did not care. They'd have principally their trouble for their pains. All they might discover as to the object of the expedition and the camp in that out-of-the-way place, would not, according to young Mr. MacLester's way of stating it, "Make 'em wise enough to hurt 'em." Whatever the reports they carried back to Lannington, no one would give them much credence anyway, he declared.
But Phil Way sturdily opposed any such surrender. The original determination to keep the real purpose of this long journey a secret could not be abandoned now, he argued, without a practical admission that Gaines and his followers had been too clever for them. Billy and Paul stood resolutely with Way. Meanwhile the Thirty had been traversing one dusty, unpaved street after another in the town's outskirts.
"They'll never be expecting to see us again to-day. Let's go back down town. If we keep our eyes open, we'll see them first, and that's all that's necessary," proposed Worth; and, being himself at the wheel, he turned the car toward the business district.
From no source came an objection. In ten minutes the machine was again standing just where it had been left before. Quite contrary to the expectations of the boys, also, they saw nothing whatever of the Trio, though they spent an hour looking about the little city and observing the hundreds of visitors.
Some had come, it appeared, simply for the day, to see the preparations for the great road races. Many were present because of a direct interest in the contests in one way or another and would remain until all was over. Racing drivers and the builders of their cars, automobile salesmen, tire men, newspaper men from many cities—motoring enthusiasts of a score of sorts and a hundred degrees of significance, from the young fellow who expected to own a runabout some day to the engineer who designed and would drive the most popular machine in the heavy car race—they were on the streets, in the hotels, thronging everywhere.
On barns, fences, trees, posts—anything that offered a chance to drive a nail, were signs, banners and all sorts of advertising matter. One might find himself informed on one post that he must use "Heapa" oil or be miserable for life. The very next post would tell him if he did not use "Slickem" oil he'd be sorry forever. And as the really quite conflicting announcements, admonitions, claims and assertions were in great variety and multiplied many times by their frequent repetition, any gentleman who might have set out to be guided by them would surely have had a serious time of it and have landed in a padded cell somewhere, sooner or later, undoubtedly.