"I'm going to Kansas, too."
Carl began to get excited.
"Und me?" he asked; "vere do I come in?"
"You're going along, of course. While I hunt up Mr. Tomlinson and have a talk with him, you go to the hotel, pay our bill and get our grips. Meet me at the station."
"Hoop-a-la!" exulted Carl. "Ve vill carry der var righdt indo dem odder fellers' gamp, I bed you. Dot's der shduff!"
Mr. Tomlinson's wholesale jewelry establishment was on Seventeenth Street. After leaving Carl, Matt made his way directly to the store.
To his intense disappointment he found that Mr. Tomlinson had been called out of town by the sickness of a relative and would probably not be back for two or three days.
Matt had planned on telling Mr. Tomlinson all about what had happened since he and Carl had reached Denver; but that was impossible now, and he would have to let Colonel Plympton do the telling. So far as the result was concerned, Matt was not doing any worrying about the way Mr. Tomlinson would receive the news of Slocum's trickery. What the young motorist had wanted, however, was to point out to Mr. Tomlinson a fact that he had not mentioned to Plympton. This was, that, unless there had been collusion between Slocum and Sercomb, the latter would not have been able to secure the alleged agreement which Matt had signed. If Slocum had been acting in good faith for the Bly-Lambert people, he would have hung onto the agreement; and if he had not been acting in good faith, the whole affair at once resolved itself into a plot of Sercomb's.
Colonel Plympton, Matt had reasoned, was probably keen enough to see that for himself. Just what effect it would have on him Matt could not know, but even a shadow of suspicion, although unwarranted, would be enough to throw a driver out of the Borden cup race.
Matt had made up his mind that he could not race for Stark-Frisbie. If he did, and lost, there might always be a feeling that there had been something in the Slocum business after all, and that he had thrown the race. The chances to drive a car for the Bly-Lambert people, on the other hand, did not seem at all flattering. They had taken three races from the Stark-Frisbie firm, and quite likely the drivers who had been successful in those contests would be the ones to drive in the present race.