Page:St. Nicholas - Volume 41, Part 1.djvu/53

1913.] Presently they were going slowly back, the one walking, the other in the wagon, both looking carefully in the middle of the road and on both sides. But the wallet was not found.

“We ’ve not missed it,” stated Pelham, presently. “And we ’ve passed the place where you had it in your hand.”

“Just around this next bend,” said Brian.

“It was in your hand as we turned the curve,” asserted Pelham.

“No,” insisted Brian, “I must look!”

They went, therefore, around the bend, Brian first, Pelham after. And there, in the middle of the road, stood a lad no older than themselves, intently examining something which he held in his hand. He was more than half turned away from them, and his face they could not see.

Instinctively Brian trod softly; and Pelham, stopping the horse, leaped silently to the ground and glided to his cousin’s side. On tiptoe they approached the boy, until they could see what he held. It was, unmistakably, a wallet.

He caught the sound of their steps, and thrust the wallet into his pocket. Then he turned. He was startled to find strangers so close upon him, and threw his head high, while his nostrils distended with his sudden gasp. But he stood his ground. Pelham felt the swift impression of the wiry, well-knit frame; the clothes, not ragged, yet apparently torn by briers; the crop of fair and well-trimmed hair, not guarded by a cap; and the high forehead; but all these he merely glimpsed, for almost immediately his attention was riveted by the stranger’s eye, alert and inquiring, yet curiously gentle. The boy was looking at Brian.

Brian rushed at him. “Give me that!”

The brown eye snapped, the nostrils opened wider, and the stranger stopped Brian with a rigid arm. As if instantly measuring him, and while holding him in play, the lad looked past Brian at Pelham, to see what threatened from him.

The eye was like that of a deer, which looks for kindness even when at bay. In spite of the frown and the set jaw, the eye was liquid, almost girlish in its appeal. Yet this was only for a moment. For Brian, grappling at the arm that held him off, cried, “Take him, Pelly!” and Pelham, unwillingly yet loyally responding, moved to take the stranger from the other side.

Then the softness vanished from the eye; it flashed dark lightning, the wiry frame bent and then snapped erect—and between Pelham and the stranger sprawled Brian, face downward in the dust.

For a moment the lad confronted Pelham; then suddenly he turned and plunged into the woods.

Pelham, leaping over his cousin, followed instantly, although a grudging admiration checked the fierceness of a true pursuit. At the third leap, he found himself amid a thicket of birches, through which the stranger had already passed. Another stride, and he tripped. As he narrowly saved himself from falling, and staggered against a tree before he could recover his balance, he saw that his chance of success was gone. The stranger had vanished behind a screen of scrub-pine, and not a sound floated back to tell of his course. Pelham returned to the road.

Brian was just rising to his feet, making unseemly sounds as he cleared his mouth of dust. “You lost him!” he accused.

“So did you,” responded Pelham. Sudden amusement seizing him at the sight of his cousin’s angry, dirty face, he turned quickly to the horse. Brian kept at his side.

“Ptoo!” he spluttered. “All dirt! Turn the horse around! Ptah! We ’ll give the alarm at the village.” In another minute, they were spinning homeward. “Faster!” urged Brian.

“We can’t keep a faster pace than this,” answered Pelham. He listened in silence to his cousin’s denunciations, until Brian grew peevish for lack of a response. “Look here,” he demanded. “That fellow has my money. Don’t you care?”

Pelham was thinking. “Brian,” he asked, “are you sure you put your wallet in your pocket before we passed that turn?”

“What if I did n’t?” returned Brian. “He could have found it at this side of the bend, and dodged out of sight.”

“Yes,” answered Pelham. “But where could he have come from? He could n’t have overtaken us, coming on foot. He certainly did n’t come this way. I should have seen him if he had been sitting by the road. And as for his coming through the woods, why, there ’s scarcely a path or a farm or a clearing from the railroad, ten miles north of this strip of road, to river, eight miles south.”

“What of it?” demanded Brian. “The thing to do is to catch him. I tell you to hurry.”

“We ’re going as fast as we can,” returned Pelham. “And as for catching him, it depends entirely on the direction that he takes. He may swing toward Nate’s farm, and if he comes out there, we ’ve as good as got him already. But if he keeps to the west of it, we ’ll have to turn out the whole town in order to catch him.”

“Then we ’ll turn out the town!” declared Brian.

Pelham asked, “What are you going to say about the money?”