“Oh! I see the house right now,” barked Josh; “and sure enough it’s just as you said, with part of the roof gone.”
“It sets near the road, so we can rush around it,” called out the leader. “Josh will go on ahead now and hide his machine among the trees near the road. Hanky, you keep with me. Perhaps we’ll enter the house, and pass out the back way, to speed on again. Josh, you hurry back so when the men leave their car to see if you’re inside the house you can get busy. Understand?”
Both of the others called out that it was perfectly clear to them. The abandoned mansion was now close at hand. Rod believed they must be drawing near the outskirts of Ostend, the Belgian watering place, which could not lie many miles beyond.
It required a clever mind to arrange all the little details of such a plan of campaign in a hurry. The fact that Rod was able to do so stamped him the right kind of a leader. Still, neither of his companions thought it strange, because they had known him to do numerous similar things in times gone by.
Josh managed to get ahead, and would thus have a brief time to hide his machine alongside the road so as to steal back towards the house before the car arrived, for it was still some little distance away.
When the men in it saw only two boys riding off they would naturally suspect that some accident had happened to the machine of the third fellow, who possibly had taken up temporary quarters in the old house. This was just what Rod wanted them to think; it would allow Josh the chance he needed to disable the car in some way or other.
Things moved along swiftly. Rod and Hanky Panky dashed up to the front of the house and stopped. Doubtless the oncoming pursuers would miss the clattering of the exhausts, and understand that they had halted for some purpose or other.
“They’ve slowed down some themselves, Rod!” cried Hanky Panky, as he stood “at attention,” ready to jump on his machine the instant Rod gave the word, so as to continue the mad flight.
The red car had come around the last bend, and was now in plain sight. For a distance of at least two miles the road ran as straight as a yard stick; so that the men could readily see that the third motorcycle lad was not in sight ahead.
“All right; it’s time we were off!” cried Rod presently.