IT was well after seven o’clock when Judy, accompanied by Kathleen, arrived at Calico Cottage.
The trip down the mountain in the station wagon had not been without excitement. Less than a half mile from the cottage, the driver had been halted by state patrolmen, who had set up a road block.
At first, the girls had assumed that motorists on the main highway were being stopped because of the fire which still smoldered in the Pine Cone Camp area. Therefore, it came as a surprise to learn that the road block had been set up for an entirely different purpose.
The state highway patrolman informed them that a truckload of auto parts had been hi-jacked during the night on a lonely stretch of road between the towns of Silverton and Grove City, some miles away. The truck was known to have followed the mountain road, making for the state line, yet had seemed to disappear into thin air.
“Somehow those birds get wind of where our road blocks are set up,” the highway patrolman had said. “The hi-jackers have a hide-out. When we’re not on their trail, they slip off the road somewhere and wait until the coast is clear.”
The bold tactics of the hi-jackers were of intense interest to the girls because of their own meeting with two of the men believed to be members of the gang.
Nor had Judy erased from her mind the fact that only a few hours earlier, she had seen the man she believed to be Joe Pompilli.
She was reflecting upon the matter as the station wagon driver let the girls off at Calico Cottage. Why, she wondered, had Lowell Diethelm been so certain that she was mistaken in the identification?
“He seemed honest enough in thinking that the man was a regular trucker on the road,” she thought. “But if I were right, and Diethelm made a mistake—”
Her reflections were interrupted by Kathleen, who nudged her in the ribs.