There are numerous wooded roads on the outskirts of fashionable Brookline, along which the attractive dwellings are much scattered, or divided by extensive estates; and through one of these roads Grady was sending his machine at a faster clip, to make up for lost time.
Suddenly, from out a little piece of woods some fifty yards away, a drunken fellow came staggering into the road, much as if he had just awakened from a nap in the shrubbery; and Nick Carter, being the first to see him, said quickly to his driver:
“Look out for that chap, Grady.”
“I see him, sir,” nodded Grady.
“He has a load aboard.”
“I should say so.”
The intoxicated man now heard the automobile approaching him from behind. He turned around, halting unsteadily in the middle of the road, where he stood swaying and staring as if too fuddled to know which side of the road to seek to avoid being run over.
Grady naturally slowed down when scarcely twenty feet from the fellow.
“Get out of the road!” he impatiently yelled. “Take one side or the other, blast you!”
The auto had come to a dead stop.