“Gee! I wish I was going with you. I might be needed.”
“One is better than two,” Patsy replied, leaping down to the road. “There’s only half the risk of being seen. I can fill the bill, all right, single-handed.”
“So long, then, and good luck.”
“Same to you.”
Danny sped on with the car.
Patsy Garvan, however, plunged into the woods, at once shaping a course that would bring him in sight of the crossroad through which Nick and Henley were to pass.
It was to enable Patsy to make this detour that Nick repeatedly stopped on the road, pretending he wanted to find footprints left by the missing couple.
Patsy accomplished the move with no great difficulty, and entirely unsuspected by Henley, owing to the artful attitude toward him that Nick had assumed.
Patsy saw them pass along the road; in fact, saw them on the edge of the pond, and then he followed them at a discreet distance until, from behind one of the outbuildings, he saw Nick held up by Henley and afterward taken into the house.
“Gee! that does settle it,” he said to himself. “I must know who is there and what’s going to come off, but it won’t do for me to approach the house from this side.[Pg 36] Those rats are in the rear rooms, or a side one, or they could not have reached the back door so quickly after Henley whistled. I’ll make a circuit to the front road and have a look.”