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Rh "Now behave yourself and come along!" cried Dick, and caught the man by the arm. "Don't let him escape!" he cried, to his brothers. "Use your sticks, and your pistols, too, if it is necessary."

The boys closed in, and the sight of the sticks and the pistols frightened the chauffeur greatly. He saw that he was trapped, and that resistance might put him in a worse hole.

"I didn't do it!" he whined, as the boys hurried him back towards the automobile. "I was hired for a certain job, that's all. The men said they had a right to carry the young ladies off—that one of 'em was the old man's stepdaughter, and that both of 'em had run away from a girls' school and wouldn't learn their lessons."

"And you mean to tell me that you believe such stuff!" snorted Tom.

"Well, that's what they told me," answered the man doggedly. "They hired the car first without telling me what sort of a job it was. Then they told me they wouldn't give me a cent if I didn't do what I was told to do. I'm a poor man, and"

"You tell it well, but I don't believe a word of it," interrupted Dick. "You have committed a serious crime, and the only way in which you can help yourself at all is by helping us."