A quarter of an hour afterward and Ralph announced that the third member of the fugitives had taken the boy, still asleep, and perhaps drugged so that he might not betray them by any crying spell brought about by fright.
“That eases my mind a whole lot,” Bud Morgan remarked; “because do you know I was afraid that fellow, with that torn sole on his shoe, might trip and hurt Reuben. But he didn’t, or else Ralph would have told us so. It’s all right, and things are working for us to beat the band.”
In fact, it was an object lesson to some of the scouts to see how cleverly Ralph managed to read those signs. Those, who up to then had not taken a great deal of interest in such things, began to realize that they were missing one of the best traditions of scoutcraft; and no doubt were taking mental resolutions that from that time on they would turn over new leaves.
They had by now gone more than a mile from the cement plant, and still the trail beckoned them on. Hugh had given it as his opinion that the three abductors must certainly be heading for some place previously selected as a hide-out.
“I base that belief on several things,” he explained, when they had halted for Ralph to rest his strained eyes a minute or two. “In the first place they’ve been hitting it up in an almost direct line. If they had been simply bent on putting as much ground as they could between themselves and the sheriff’s posse, they would have been apt to turn to the right or to the left from time to time as if uncertain which way to go. Am I right, Ralph?”
“It sounds good to me, Hugh,” came the ready response to his question.
“Another thing,” continued the scout master, always willing to pass around any knowledge he might possess, “it isn’t likely these desperate men would go into a game like this without laying all their plans beforehand. They take a lot of risk as it is, because kidnapping a child is a felony that calls for twenty years in the penitentiary.”
Ralph, being rested, evinced a desire to once more take up his onerous duties, and so the little heart-to-heart talk ended for the time being. Such things as these, however, were apt to arouse an additional interest in the minds of lagging scouts, and cause them to watch Ralph’s movements with more concern than ever.
That first mile began to lengthen until some of them felt it must surely be double that distance they had passed over. Still not one complaint had been uttered or a sigh heard.
Nurse Jones seemed to be able to hold her own with the best of them. Apparently it had been no idle boast on her part when she told Hugh she made it a practice to walk ten miles every day and frequently double that far. At that rate, there was really more danger of some of the boys dropping out than of Nurse Jones failing in her self-imposed task.