[CHAPTER I.]
A NIGHT MYSTERY.
"Oh, py shiminy! Look at dere, vonce! Vat it iss, Matt? Br-r-r! I feel like I vould t'row some fits righdt on der shpot! It's a shpook, you bed you!"
A strange event was going forward, there under the moon and stars of that New Mexico night. The wagon-road followed the base of a clifflike bank, and at the outer edge of the road there was a precipitous fall into Stygian darkness.
A second road entered the first through a narrow gully. A few yards beyond the point where the thoroughfares joined an automobile was halted, its twin acetylene lamps gleaming like the eyes of some fabled monster in the semigloom.
Two boys were on the front seat of the automobile, and one of them had leaned over and gripped the arm of the lad who had his hands on the steering-wheel. The eyes of the two in the car were staring ahead.
What the boys saw was sufficiently startling, in all truth.
Out of the gully, directly in advance of them, had rolled a white automobile—springing ghostlike out of the darkness as it came under the glare of the acetylene lights.
The white car was a runabout, with two seats in front and an abnormally high deck behind. It carried no lamps, moved with weird silence, and, strangest of all, there was no one in either seat! Yet, with no hand on the steering-wheel, the white car made the dangerous turn out of the gully into the main road with the utmost ease, and was now continuing on between the foot of the cliff and the brink of the chasm with a steadiness that was—well, almost hair-raising.