At this moment they were startled by the sound of a machine coming behind them at furious speed. Some chickens, crossing the road and pecking lazily as they went, scurried with alarmed squawking into the woods on either side.

The girls, turning, started, gasped, then stared at each other.

"The motorcyclist!" cried Mollie, as they turned and ran after the fast disappearing machine.

CHAPTER XXI

THE CHASE

"I--I--don't know what we're running after him for!" gasped Mollie. "We haven't got a chance--in the world--of catching--him."

"Look," panted Betty, pointing to a machine at the side of the road with a man in chauffeur's uniform sitting behind the wheel, "maybe we can get him! Quick--"

Betty's action always followed hard upon the heels of impulse, and before any of the girls had time to realize what she was going to do she had darted across the road, had said a few excited words, and was tumbling into the tonneau.

Without stopping to question, the girls followed, jumping in beside her, and the chauffeur, after one surprised look, touched his cap and the machine leapt forward like a wild thing.

Mollie had time, even in her excitement, to wonder how Betty had managed it.

"I think she hypnotizes them," she muttered to herself.

And all Betty had really said to the man was, "Please follow that motorcyclist! We mustn't lose sight of him!" and the man, obeying that impulse for adventure that is in all of us, had complied.

The motorcyclist had sped around the corner and darted into one of the side streets. A few minutes later the chauffeur turned the same corner with a recklessness that made them gasp, turned it just in time to see their quarry disappearing round another corner.

"Gosh, that fellow can coax some speed out of that machine of his!" cried the man at the wheel. "But if you young ladies don't mind a little danger, we may catch him yet."

"Oh, please don't think about us," cried Betty, her hands clutching the back of the seat, her eyes straining after the flying speck that seemed to be growing smaller every second. "Oh, we must catch him,--we must! It would be awful to lose him now!"

"Well, here goes," responded the man behind the wheel, and under his skillful touch the machine leapt forward like a spirited horse at the touch of the lash.

"That's it, that's it!" cried Mollie, almost beside herself with excitement. "Just hear that engine purr! He can't get away from us now!"

"Oh, if we could only take him back to Camp Liberty with us!"

"I thought so," said the chauffeur, and even in their excitement they had time to look in surprise at his back.

"Wh-what did you think?" stammered Betty.

"That you were the girls up at the Hostess House that everybody is talking about," he told her, while the girls fairly gasped with surprise at this proof of their widespread fame. "That's why I didn't ask questions but just did as I was told," he added. And somehow they knew, though they could not see his face, that he was grinning. "You see, I'd always heard that you most always got what you set out to get, and I didn't waste time arguin'," he finished.

The girls laughed hysterically, and Betty said, with a funny little inflection:

"Sounds as if we were very strong-minded. But we don't care about that,"

she added, once more fixing her gaze anxiously on the road before them, "if we can only catch that man."

"May I ask who he is, miss?" asked the man.

"He's--he's a--criminal!" returned Betty, her little fists clenched fiercely.

"A criminal?" he repeated with interest. "May I ask what kind?"

"A murderer," cried Mollie fiercely, adding, as the man started and the girls looked at her in surprise: "Well, he might just as well have been.

He didn't even stop to see whether he was or not, which is about the same thing."

There was a sound from the front seat that sounded suspiciously like a chuckle, but not being quite sure, the girls could do nothing whatever about it.

"But look--he's getting away from us!" wailed Amy suddenly, and once more all their attention was focused on the chase.

And, quite suddenly, while they watched, the motorcyclist disappeared from view as if the earth had opened and swallowed him up.

A few seconds later, with a grinding of brakes, the car stopped at the spot where he had disappeared, and the girls looked at one another despairingly.

The path that he had taken seemed no more than a broad foot path through the woods, so narrow that no machine could follow him, and of course there was no chance of catching him on foot.

"He got away from us!" cried Grace, voicing a rather self-evident fact.

"I'm afraid so, miss," said the man, and he seemed so genuinely disappointed that they looked at him gratefully. "The man must be rather much of a dare-devil, your criminal," he added, eyeing the b.u.mpy path thoughtfully. "An ordinary rider wouldn't be able to go two yards along that path without coming to grief."

"Do you know where this path leads to?" asked Betty, struck with a sudden inspiration. "If there's another road we might circle round and head him off."

"Sorry, miss," he said, "but the road that path leads to is nothing but a wagon road, and we'd have to go several miles before we'd cross it. And the chances are," he added, "that the fellow would double back upon himself and we'd have the run for nothing."

Betty shook her head resignedly, for, hard as it was to relinquish the man, all that the chauffeur had said was founded on hard common sense and she could see there was no alternative.

"I guess you're right," she said at last, after a pause during which the girls had looked at her hopefully. Betty so often found a way where no one else could that they never completely gave up hope until she herself relinquished it.

So now they sighed and climbed soberly back into the machine.

"Where to?" inquired the chauffeur, as he turned the car and headed back the way they had come. "If you're going back to the camp," he suggested, "I can take you there. Or anywhere you say."

"You've been awfully good," cried Betty, with real grat.i.tude in her voice.

"But you don't have to take us away back to camp. If you will drop us at the end of the road we can walk back." All this despite sundry vigorous and desperate shakings of Grace's head and pantomimic pointings toward her feet. At the conclusion of Betty's sentence she groaned, but brightened up again at the chauffeur's response.

"It won't be any trouble," he said, "to take you all the way back to camp.

In fact"--a little shyly--"I'd like to."

"Then we'd be very, very glad to accept," said Betty cordially. "For we have walked a long way and are rather tired."

At the gates of Camp Liberty they got out of the car, thanked the chauffeur, and while they were hesitating whether or not to offer him money for his trouble, the latter turned the car and, with a last lifting of his cap and waving of his hand, was gone.

"Isn't he nice?" sighed Amy, as they started toward the Hostess House, Grace limping a little and bringing up the rear. "Meeting a man like that gives you new faith in human nature."

"Goodness, Will had better look out," chaffed Mollie, a little gleam of humor shining through her weariness. "I always thought you had it in you to run off with a chauffeur, Amy."