"I told him to skip, and to take with him all the money of his father's that he could get his hands on. Old Lorry is a brute, and I didn't make any bones of telling George what I thought."
"And George skipped, taking ten thousand dollars from his father's safe," said Big John. "He went to Chicago first, then bought a ticket to 'Frisco. When he got there he had made friends with three men, and one of those men was me. I'm a villain, Ollie, and ought to be a horrible example to every young fellow who's got sense enough to know right from wrong, and the minute I learned Lorry had ten thousand dollars I planned with my two pals, Kinky and Ross, to get it. We'd have got away with it, too, on a boat to the Sandwich Islands, where I could have bought a pineapple plantation and, mebby, have lived honest for the rest of my life, but something happened."
Big John looked through the bushes, out along the road, and scowled blackly.
"What happened?" demanded Ollie.
"A chap named Joe McGlory——"
"I've heard of him," interrupted Ollie. "He's a cousin of George's, and lives in Arizona. A cowboy and a rowdy—nothing refined or genteel in his make up. Go on."
"Well, McGlory got a message from young Lorry's father asking him to go to 'Frisco and hunt for George. McGlory went, but he'd never have found George in a thousand years if it hadn't been for some one else who butted into the game."
Big John scowled again, this time more fiercely than he had done before.
"Who was it?" queried Ollie.
"Hold your horses a minute," proceeded Big John. "McGlory and this other fellow took after Kinky, Ross, and me, and dropped on us like a thousand of brick. My, oh, my! Say, that other lad was the clear quill, all right. I've seen a good many likely younkers, but never one to match him. I guess you'd call him a 'sissy,' seeing as how he don't smoke, or drink, or gamble, but just trains his muscle to keep in form and cultivates his brain along the line of motors, gasoline motors. And muscle! Son, that fellow's got a 'right' any man would be proud to own, and what he don't know about chug-engines nobody knows."