Reading my thoughts, the other laughed.
“Old Chew isn’t heading for Sandy Ridge to get the sheriff, Jerry. He’s going over there—so he thinks!—to draw up a will for a deaf and dumb lady with cork legs who read about him in the Police Gazette and wants him to take her money and build a home for crippled nutmegs.”
“Good night!” I stared at him. “Are you cuckoo?”
“Don’t you catch on, Jerry?” he further laughed. “To keep old Chew from calling in the Garrison sheriff, I ’phoned here to the house, getting his wife, and now he’s heading for Sandy Ridge on a wild-goose chase. He’ll be gone all day looking for the rich lady with the cork legs, so Ma is safe until to-morrow at least.”
Our tire fixed, we went another block to the concrete, only to learn, in sort of sickening disappointment, that the road to Pardyville was closed. A bridge had been washed out during the storm, and the automobiles going east and west were hitting it along C. H. O., which was open again. Our only way to get to Pardyville was to go back over the same road that we had come, and then east on C. H. O.
I now saw that Poppy was worried. And I knew why. Facing another long trip across the Sahara Desert he was thinking that we never would be able to get to Pardyville and back that night. Not that we expected to meet the granddaughter at the depot, but it had been a sort of vague hope with us that we would get track of her in town, for Pardyville wasn’t a big place. If we didn’t find her, or she didn’t soon show up of her own accord, it would be all day with poor Ma. And that was no happy thought for us.
Young fatty yelled something at us when we passed his house on the way back. But our old buss made too much racket for us to hear him. Anyway, his smart gab didn’t interest us.
We never expected to see him again. But we did! And toward the last under conditions that were pretty blamed exciting, let me tell you.
CHAPTER XI
THE RUNAWAY
I think it was around eleven o’clock when we pulled out of Neponset Corners on our way back to C. H. O. We had been three hours on the road, and if we were as long going back it would be two o’clock before we came to the big stone house where we had started from. To get to the highway from there would eat up another hour. And how long it then would take us to get to Pardyville, we could only guess at. However, we were going to do the best we could.