“No apologies needed, son,” he hastened to say, cheerily. “Yuh knows your business best, and if yuh chase after it in the same way yuh won your spurs over tuh Lawrence, I reckons now yuh’ll upset all the kalculations o’ thet schemer. Good-bye an’ good luck tuh yuh, boys!”
He waved his official hand to them as they shot forward, and the last Blake saw of the odd, though good-hearted country constable, he was standing there in the road looking after the retreating car, and still waving his sombrero, while that bright nickel star on his manly breast gleamed in the rays of the westering sun.
“Congratulations, Hugh!” cried Blake, bubbling over with delight over their recent narrow escape. “They say chickens come home to roost, and that good deeds will pay a fellow back a thousand fold. Well, I want to tell you there never was such a positive illustration of their truth as this.”
“The best of it is,” laughed Hugh, happily, “that no matter how much our enemy plots against us, something comes along to upset all his calculations. He thought we were stuck there all afternoon, with an engine out of joint, but Bud here fooled him. Then there was that broken bottle game, which did hold us up a bit; but in spite of a slit tire we got started again. Last, but far from least, he fixed up this clever trick of telling the old constable three boys had stolen a car, and were coming along the road a ways back; also hinting that there might be a good reward offered for capturing the rascals and holding them over-night in the town cooler. But again our luck held good, and we slipped through.”
“I’m satisfied now,” asserted Blake Merton, “that nothing is going to keep us from getting there some time tonight. I’ll hunt up Felix right away, talk to him like a Dutch uncle, get him to write that letter, and then the first thing in the morning we can start back home again.”
“If anything goes wrong with the car, we’ll find some other way of returning, make up your mind to that, Blake,” Hugh assured him.
It was in this happy frame of mind that the three scouts passed through the little town of Hallettsburg, and continued onward. As they went they could frequently discover plain signs that to their practiced eyes assured them the battery had traversed the same road they were now on. Perhaps a boy untrained in the art of using his eyes, and seeing small things that told a story, would never have been able to accomplish this thing; but Hugh, Bud and Blake had served their time at studying woodcraft, as practiced by the Indians from the days of Daniel Boone, and they knew dozens of things that would, when noticed and examined, tell an interesting story.
The sun was getting pretty low in the west, and evening was coming on. It was about the last quarter of the moon, which had been full on the fifteenth of the month, so that no help from this source could be expected until toward midnight, when the silvery remnant would be seen rising in the East. That was one reason why the boys were anxious to be getting on as fast as they dared chance it, because, once night settled in, their progress would be blocked.
“The sun’s going down, Hugh,” announced Blake, with a touch of dismay in his voice.
“That’s all very true,” replied the scout master, “but we’ll have half an hour of light yet, perhaps more, and I think we ought to make the camp in that time!”