“By Jove, this shows that I am on the right road, and Nick, of course, must be following the wrong one,” thought Chick, upon picking up the scrap of lace. “It would be useless for me to signal him. We are too widely separated by this time for him to hear me. Nor would there be anything in turning back and trying to overtake him and set him right. That would be a loss of valuable time. I’ll plug on, therefore, and see where the trail leads.”
It was another case of all roads leading to Rome. The distance to the Ardley place by the way Chick was taking, however, was considerably longer than that followed by Nick, which allowed for the episodes in which the latter figured while the former was covering the distance.
Half an hour brought Chick to the river and to the bridge mentioned by Dugan. He then could see in the far distance the spires of the town, but he was too far down the stream to see the road house or any of the buildings Nick had noticed.
“The rascals must have gone this way, of course, for I have passed no diverging road,” Chick rightly reasoned, while striding on across the bridge. “They may have been heading for that town, or for some isolated place near it. There is no branch road at the end of the bridge, so I cannot possibly take a wrong one. It would be encouraging, nevertheless, to find another fragment of the girl’s veil. Something evidently prevented her from dropping more of them.”
The road wound through the woods and out of view of the river after leaving the bridge, and another half hour had passed when Chick again came in sight of the[Pg 35] stream. He then could see the distant road house on the opposite bank, but no sign of any persons near it.
Dugan’s launch no longer was at the float where Nick had observed it.
Chick hurried on, and presently met with a surprise, a most agreeable one. He caught sight of another fragment of the torn veil, and of the narrow road leading toward the river.
“Eureka!” he muttered, hastening to pick it up. “Here’s another scrap, at last. The girl must have dropped it to denote that her abductors took this side road. In that case—oh, by Jove, here are three more, and lying in a line denoting——”
Chick had stopped short in the side road, and his process of reasoning then was precisely what Nick had anticipated. The circumstances, in fact, admitted of only one logical conclusion.
“By gracious, there’s nothing to it,” thought Chick, elated. “Nick has been here. No one else could have had four pieces of the veil, and surely no one else would have placed them so suggestively in this direction. He must have picked up a clew that brought him here, and he evidently figured that I would come along this road. So he left these here to direct me.”