"Hold it back! Hold it back!" screamed Tinker, and with the unquestioning obedience of the perfectly disciplined man, a simple young soldier caught hold of the back of the car, and threw all his heart and strength into the effort to stop it, only to find himself running fast. At sixty yards he was running faster and shouting loudly. At eighty yards, he stopped shouting, let go, and fell down.

Tinker looked back, and saw him sitting up in the dust and shaking his fist, while forty yards beyond him his fellow-soldiers danced gesticulating in the middle of the road.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Hold it back!" screamed Tinker.]

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

TINKER MEETS HIS OLD NURSE

Tinker let the car rip on, the while he considered what he should do.

He was excited, determined, he accepted readily enough the responsibility which had fallen upon him, but he was hardly happy. He could see no hope of rescuing Dorothy and Elsie by himself, even if he caught the carriage; and since he reckoned that it would take his father two or three hours to turn the Riviera upside down, and extricate himself and Mr. Rainer from the extremely neat and effective trap into which they had fallen, he could look for no help from them till far into the night. For a while he suffered from the sense that he had bitten off, or rather had had thrust into his mouth, more than he could chew. Then of a sudden he saw that the really important thing, the d.o.g.g.i.ng the kidnappers, was in his power, and he regained his cheerfulness.

He drove on the car at full speed for ten miles, and inquired of a peasant walking beside a cart loaded with bags of grain, if he had seen the carriage. The peasant had seen it; he was vague as to how long ago, and how far away, but Tinker was sure that he had seen it.

Accordingly, he drove on the car at full speed again. In this way, going at full speed, and now and again slowing down to inquire, he got over a good many miles. He was frightened when he went through a town lest the police should try to stop him, but it seemed that they had received no such instructions from Ventimiglia. All the while he was drawing nearer the carriage, for all that, somewhere or other, it had plainly changed horses.

At last he made up his mind that he would overtake it in the next seven miles; and he bucketed the car along for all she was worth. At the end of the seven miles he had not overtaken it, nor was there any appearance of it on the road before him, a level stretch of two miles.

However, he ran on another five miles, and there was no sign of it, nor had anyone he pa.s.sed or met, seen it. Plainly he had overshot it.

He turned the car, and came back, stopping to examine branch roads for its wheel-tracks, losing the ground he had made up. Some seven miles back, he came to a road leading to a great gap in the hills. A little girl was feeding a few lean sheep at the corner of it. No: she had seen no carriage; she had only been here a little while: the road ran up to Camporossa. Tinker considered it, and it invited his search. It went high into the hills, and he saw little towns here and there on their sides. He sent the car slowly down it. For seventy yards the roadway was hard, or stony; then came a patch of dust, smooth and unmarked by a wheel-track. Any vehicle going along the road must have pa.s.sed over it, and a wave of disappointment submerged Tinker's spirit; the road had seemed so very much the right one. He stopped the car, and stared blankly at the patch of dust. Suddenly his quick eye caught a curious marking on its surface. He jumped down, and bent over it: sure enough, the patch had been brushed and smoothed with a bough.

He hurried the car back to the corner of the road, and by entreaties, persuasion, cajoling, a five-franc piece, and even--great concession!--a kiss, he wrung from the little shepherdess a promise that she would wait till dark if need were, stop every motor-car that came from the direction of the frontier, and say, "The kidnappers have gone up this road." He was a.s.sured that his father would borrow or hire a motorcar, and follow in it.

Then he turned the car for Camporossa. Three hundred yards up the road he came to another patch of dust, and saw the wheel-tracks of the carriage deep and plain. He sent along the car as hard as he dared, for, as the road grew steeper along the hillside, it grew stonier and stonier, thanks to its serving, like most Italian hill roads, as a watercourse to carry off the rain from the hills. A very slow and painful jolting brought him among the olive groves of Camporossa and into that little town.

He stopped before the little Inn, and was served with milk and bread and fruit. As he ate and drank, he was all affability and information to the group of the curious who gathered round the car. He was an English boy; his family had gone on in front in a carriage, and he was following them in the car. He learned at once that the carriage had gone on to Dolceacqua, and was less than an hour ahead.

He paid for his food and milk, and without delay sent the car up the steep hillside. He had to nurse and coax it up the steepest parts.

After another long jolting he reached Dolceacqua, vexed all the time by the knowledge that the carriage was going as fast as he over such roads. The magnificent view of the Mediterranean from the rose-gardens of Dolceacqua afforded him no pleasure at all; it made only too clear to him the risk he would run, if he recovered Dorothy and Elsie and had to descend that steep at any pace. At Dolceacqua he learned that the carriage was little more than half an hour ahead, on the road to Islabona. He was pleased to hear that, for all the badness of the road, he had gained upon it: plainly the horses were tiring.

Another steep climb brought him up to Islabona, to learn that the carriage had turned to the right along the road to Apricale. To his surprise and satisfaction he found this road smooth, and once more, after long crawling, sent the car along at full speed. It was time to make haste, for the sun was setting. A mile from Apricale he saw a cloud of dust ahead of him, and he knew that he had the kidnappers in sight. He slowed down, for he did not wish to be seen by them. Then when the dust-cloud vanished into the straggling town, he hurried on again, for if they pushed on through the darkness, he would have to follow by the sound of their wheels.

He came through Apricale at a moderate speed. Then a mile beyond it, as he came to the top of a little hill, he saw the carriage moving slowly down an avenue, to a house on the left, some hundred yards from the road. He stopped the car with a jerk, backed it a little way down the hill, and from the brow watched the carriage drive up to the house.

Then the sun set, and the swift twilight fell.

He set about filling up the petrol tank, and making sure that the lamp was ready to light. Then he backed the car into a clump of trees, and set out across the fields for the house. It was the dark hour after sunset, and he found most of the bushes th.o.r.n.y. Presently he came into a deserted garden, overgrown with rank weeds and unclipped shrubs. He hoped devoutly that the scorpions and tarantulas would await the pa.s.sing of the sunset chill in their lairs. To all seeming they did, for he pushed through the garden without mishap, and came to the house.

It was a four-square, two-storied building, with something of the air of a fortress, a useful abode in those once brigand-ridden hills, some old-time gentleman's country-seat; a mat of creepers covered it to its tiled roof. The side near him was dark; and from the back came the voices of three stablemen about their business. He stole round to the front; and that too was dark. But on the further side two rooms were lighted, one on the ground floor, one above.

A chatter of excited voices came from the lower windows; and Tinker came to within ten yards of it, and looked in through the heavy bars.

Three men were dining at the table: a freckled redheaded man with the high cheekbones of the Scot, a dissipated young Italian of a most romantic air, and a small, round, vivacious man, ineffably French.

"I'm going to marry the girl, say what you will!" the Italian cried.

"Where would your scheme have been without my aid? Where would you have found a house like this, out of the world, secure from search, in a country where everyone is as silent as the grave in my interests?"

"Pardon, my dear Monteleone," said the Frenchman; "_I_ am going to marry the lady. Without me, there would have been no scheme for you to help. I made it. I rank first. I marry the young lady."

"What's all this talk about marrying the girl?" roared the Scotchman, in French. "We agreed on a ransom of a million and a half francs, five hundred thousand francs each!"

"The lady's beauty has changed all that," said the Frenchman. "I am going to marry her."

"No, no: it's me; it's me," said the Italian.

"Have done with this foolish talk!" roared the Scotchman, banging the table. "If either of you marries her, the poor young thing will be a widow in a fortnight. I know Septimus Rainer; he'll shoot such a son-in-law at sight!"

"Shoot me! Shoot me! This American mushroom shoot a Monteleone for marrying his daughter!" cried the Italian. "Why, the Monteleones were Crusaders! He'll be proud of the alliance!"

"Very proud--very proud he'll be will Septimus Rainer--when he's shot ye," jeered the Scotchman.

A movement overhead drew Tinker's attention; he looked up, to see Dorothy leaning out of the window above. He uttered the short click which served him as a signal when he played the part of chief conspirator. She looked straight down at him, but did not move or answer, and he knew that there was someone, an enemy, in the room with her. The kidnappers still disputed vehemently; and he stole up to the wall, and began to climb the vine which covered the side of the house.

He disturbed a number of roosting small birds; but Dorothy's suitors were putting forward their pretensions to her hand with a clamour which drowned the flutter of wings. He climbed up and up, and Dorothy never stirred; and at last he looked under her arm into the room. Elsie, with her elbows on the table, was staring miserably at the grim, forbidding face of an elderly woman who sat on a chair backed up against the door.

Tinker looked at the woman and could scarcely believe his eyes, then he laughed gently, slipped over the window-sill, and said cheerfully, "Hullo, Selina, how are you?"

The grim woman started up with a little cry, stared at him, ran across the room, and began to hug him furiously, crying, "Oh, Master Tinker!

Master Tinker! What a turn you did give me!"

"Drop it, Selina! Drop it!" said Tinker, struggling out of her embrace. "You know how I hate being s...o...b..red over!"

Then he dodged Dorothy and Elsie, who advanced upon him with one accord and one purpose of kissing him, and cried, "No, no! This is no time for foolery!"

"But I don't understand," said Dorothy.

"Oh! Selina's my old nurse. What are you doing here, Selina? I never expected you to turn kidnapper at your age!"

"Nothing of the kind, Master Tinker! I'm paid to help save these poor lambs from them Popish Jesuits, and I'm going to do it!"

"Let's hear about this," said Tinker, sitting down on the table.

"It's my poor husband's cousin, Mr. Alexander McNeill. He engaged me to come here to act as maid to a young lady he was helping get away from those Jesuits who were trying to force her into a convent to get her money," said Selina.

"You've been humbugged, then. What you are doing is helping to kidnap my adopted sister Elsie, and Miss Dorothy Rainer, the daughter of an American millionaire," said Tinker joyfully.

Dorothy started and flushed. "How did you learn that?" she said quickly.

"Your father's come from America, and he and my father are looking for you, though where they are there's no saying. I left them at Ventimiglia arrested as spies," said Tinker.

"Arrested as spies?" cried Dorothy.

But Selina, whose face had undergone a slow but violent change, broke in, "So Alexander's humbugged me, has he? He's brought me all the way from Paris here by a lie about Jesuits having tried to bury this young lady in one of their nasty convents, to do his dirty kidnapping work, has he? I'll kidnap him! I'll teach him to play these tricks on me!"

"Do!" said Tinker with warm approval. "You let him have it! Think that you're pitching into me like you used to! Come along, all of you!

Selina's simply tremendous when her back's up!"

Selina opened the door, and went down the stairs with all the outraged majesty of a Boadicea. The three of them followed her quietly, and at the bottom Tinker bade Dorothy and Elsie unbar the door of the house and himself kept close behind Selina. She opened the door of the room; and at the sight of her the sustained shriek in which the Italian and the Frenchman were conversing died suddenly down, and the three kidnappers stared at her.

"You nasty, body-s.n.a.t.c.hing sc.u.m!" said Selina, glowering at them.

"Eh! What? You're daft, woman! What's the matter?" said McNeill.