“Thought you saw,” corrected Joe.
“All right, then,” said Jim patiently, “let it go at that—thought I saw Braxton passing the door. Now just suppose for a minute that I was right and see what comes of it. The man who hates you worse, probably, than any man on earth—the man to whom you gave a terrible thrashing—knew that you would be driving a car just before daylight—knew that you would have to climb a hill—knew that as you got near it you’d probably put on speed to carry the car up—knew that an obstacle put near the bottom of the hill would almost certainly wreck the car and hurt the driver. Knowing all this, might not such a man as we know Braxton to be see his chance and take it?”
There was silence for a moment. Then:
“It certainly sounds strong the way you put it,” Joe said thoughtfully. “But how on earth could Braxton get here in time to do all this? Think of the distance.”
“It isn’t so great a distance,” rejoined Jim. “That is, if a man came straight across country in a speedy car for instance. It seemed long to us because of the roundabout way we had to go by train. Then too that was early in the afternoon, and Braxton could have had four hours’ start of us. He’s a rich man and probably has a fast car. He could have made it all right and got here hours ago.”
“Yes, but even then,” argued Joe, “he couldn’t have done it all alone. It’s as much as you and I can do together to handle these timbers.”
“That’s true,” conceded Jim. “But he may have had one or more confederates with him. Money you know can do almost anything. I shouldn’t wonder if that fellow Fleming helped him. He owed you a debt too, you remember, and the pair were as thick as thieves on the world tour.”
“Well, it may be just as you say,” replied Joe. “But I hate to think that any man hates me so badly as to try to injure me in such a cowardly way as that. At any rate, it won’t do any harm for us to keep our eyes open in the future. But we’ve got plenty of time to think of that. Now let’s get busy and hustle these timbers over to the side of the road so that nobody else can run into them. Then we’ll take a look at the car.”
They set to work with a will, and in a few minutes had removed the obstacles from the road.
“Now for the machine,” said Joe, as he led the way to the river bank. “I’ve got an idea that what we owe Hank will put a dent in our bank rolls.”