“Well, when the Federal officers got close on the trail of the outlaws they hid the plates and other things I mentioned, and sort of left Biggin in charge of the camp. But at once all the sheriffs in the State got busy. There’s a good, big reward offered for the discovery of the evidence the authorities need to convict the gang.
“After Biggin talked with me, he got scared. He wrote me he’d send the dummy to lead me to the place where the plates, and so forth, were cached. But he never came to me—the dummy didn’t, I mean.
“Now, what you tell me, Parker, about the Speedwells meeting and being friendly with Biggin’s nephew, has made me suspicious——”
“I’m sorry if it made you suspicious of Dan and Billy,” said the county clerk. “No need.”
“That may be. But they go out to that island—and I believe the dummy is on the island part of the time. It may be, from what you tell me about the paper the Speedwells say he dropped, that the engraving plates and the other stuff is hidden on that Island Number One.”
“You haven’t any reason to suspect Dan and Billy, just the same,” declared Mildred, promptly.
Both the sheriff and Mr. Parker laughed. “Now, don’t you put me in your bad books, Miss Milly,” begged Sheriff Kimball. “I don’t mean to cause the boys any trouble. I am hoping to-night to catch Harry Biggin and make him talk plainly. That’s the object of this trip—although it is a pleasure to take you young ladies for a drive,” and he laughed again.
He spoke to the horses then, and the blacks switched their tails and “let out a notch” in their speed. They seemed as eagerly desirous of covering the distance to the Biggin farm in a short time as their master.
The girls cowered down behind the high back of the front seat, and so had the wind broken for them. But it was awfully cold. Now and then a flake of snow slanted down upon them, and the girls’ shoulders were nicely powdered before the sheriff turned the horses’ heads toward the far side of the river, and they found an easily sloping bit of bank up which they could drive.
This was beyond the last of the string of islands, and the lights of Meadville—on the other bank—were in sight. Just ahead, as the horses struggled into a well traveled highway, where the runners gritted on the half-bare ground, was a lamp in a window.