"What's your hurry?" he demanded. "Hold on!"
Joe did not answer, but, eluding the outstretched hands, made the sidewalk in a jump and ran up the street. He was fleet of foot—his training gave him that—and soon he was safe from pursuit, though, as a matter of fact, no one came after him. Shalleg and his tools were hardly ready for such desperate measures yet, it seemed.
Joe passed a side street, and, looking up it, saw at the other end, a more brilliantly lighted thoroughfare. Arguing rightly that he would be safer there, Joe turned up, and soon was in a more decent neighborhood. His heart was beating rapidly, partly from the run, and partly through apprehension, for he had an underlying fear that it would not have been for his good to have gone into the room where Shalleg was.
"Whew! That was a happening," remarked Joe, as he slowed down. "I wonder what it all meant? Shalleg must be getting desperate. But why does he keep after me? Unless he thinks I am responsible for his not getting a place on the Cardinals. It's absurd to think that, but it does seem so. I wonder what I'd better do?"
Joe tried to reason it out, and then came the recollection of Rad.
"I'll telephone to the hotel, and see if he's come back," he said. "Then, when I meet him, I'll tell him all that happened. It's a queer go, sure enough."
A telephone message to the hotel clerk brought the information that Rad had telephoned in himself, saying that he had been unexpectedly detained, and would meet Joe at the theatre entrance.
"That's good!" thought our hero. For one moment, after running away from the gloomy house, he had had a notion that perhaps Rad had also been lured there. Now he knew his friend was safe.
"Sorry I couldn't come back to the hotel for you," Rad greeted Joe, as they met in front of the theatre. "But my business took me longer than I counted on. We're in time for the show, anyhow. It starts a little later in summer."
"That's all right," said Joe. "As a matter of fact I have been away from the hotel myself, for some time."