“In wrong, in dead wrong!” Patsy repeated, quite crushed with sudden dismay. “That’s not my quarry—not Doctor Devoll. He’s too straight, too erect, too square and stocky, for Doctor Devoll. I’ve gone lame, for fair, as lame as an army mule. That chauffeur must have dropped the physician and picked up another passenger.”
CHAPTER XV.
PROFESSOR KARL GRAFF.
Patsy Garvan’s disappointment was as deep and bitter as one could imagine. He scarce could contain it, in fact, and his first impulse was to bolt from his concealment and demand of the chauffeur where he had left Doctor David Devoll.
Brief reflection, however, convinced Patsy that that would be a fatal mistake, that the chauffeur might be in league with the physician, after all, and that this stranger who had unexpectedly alighted from the motor car might also be one of Doctor Devoll’s confederates, sent by him to his road house on a mission which he had thought it indiscreet to personally undertake.
“I’ll hold my horses,” thought Patsy, with hopes reviving. “There may be something doing, after all, that will set me right. I’ll wait and see. He seems to be giving that driver important instructions.”
The two men had been talking quietly in the driveway, too low for Patsy to hear so much as a single word, but the elderly man now turned abruptly up the steps and peered into the hall for a moment, and then entered the house.
The chauffeur closed the door of the car, then turned and shot a searching glance in each direction, causing Patsy to crouch lower in his concealment.
Presently, approaching the corner, the driver gazed toward the rear of the house, then started abruptly and walked completely around it, returning to the same corner and taking a position from which he could continue to watch the side windows, also the driveway leading to the stable yard, on that side of the house nearest to Patsy.
It was a situation that now precluded any move on Patsy’s part. To approach any of the windows, or even to steal away and seek an advantage elsewhere, was out of the question. Detection would be inevitable. He had no alternative but to lie low.