his jaw forward in an ugly manner. But he took his hand from Ruth’s arm.
Neale said to the girls, quite quietly though his eyes flashed:
“Mrs. Heard wants you to come back to the car at once. Please hurry.”
“Say! I don’t get you,” began the rough again.
“You will in a moment,” Neale shot at him. “Go away, girls!”
Agnes did not want to go now; but Ruth saw it would be better and she fairly dragged her sister away.
“Neale will be hurt!” moaned Agnes, all the way to the car. “That awful rowdy has friends, of course.”
What really happened to Neale the girls never knew, for he would not talk about it. Trained from his very babyhood as an acrobat, the ex-circus boy would be able to give a good account of himself if it came to fisticuffs with the freckled-faced fellow. Although the latter was considerably older and taller than Neale, the way he had lived had not hardened his muscles and made him quick of eye and foot or handy with his fists.
Perhaps Neale did not fight at all. At least he came back to the car without a mark upon him and without even having had his clothes ruffled. All he said in answer to the excited questions of the girls was:
“That’s a fellow called Saleratus Joe. You can tell why – his face with all those yellow freckles looks like an old fashioned saleratus biscuit. He belongs in Milton. I’ve seen him before. He isn’t much better than a saloon lounger.”
“Goodness me!” exclaimed Mrs. Heard. “Saleratus Joe is one of the fellows who my nephew thinks stole his automobile. I must tell him that we saw the fellow. Perhaps the car can be traced after all.”
“Through Saleratus Joe?” said Neale O’Neil. “Well – maybe.”
CHAPTER V – DOT’S AWFUL ADVENTURE
Altogether that first run in their automobile was pronounced a jolly success by the Corner House girls. The return journey from Marchenell Grove was without incident.
“If we had only become acquainted with Mrs. Heard the trip would have been more than worth while,” declared Ruth, who was seldom as enthusiastic about a new acquaintance as she was about the aunt of the county surveyor. “She is coming to see us soon.”
Agnes was more interested in another thing, and she confided in Neale.
“Do you really suppose, Neale,” she asked, “that the awful fellow who spoke to Ruth is one of those who stole Mr. Collinger’s auto?”
“Saleratus Joe?” chuckled the boy.
“Hasn’t he any other name? It sounds like – like the Wild West in the movies, or something like that.”
“They only call him that for fun,” explained Neale O’Neil. “And whether he helped get away with the surveyor’s machine or not, I’m sure I don’t know.”
“But can’t you guess?” cried Agnes, in exasperation.
“What’s the use of guessing?” returned her boy chum. “That won’t get you anywhere. You’re a poor detective, Aggie.”
“Don’t make fun,” complained Agnes, who was very much excited about the automobile robbery. They had just got their car, and she had longed for it so deeply that she was beginning to be worried for fear something would happen to it.
“Shut Tom Jonah into the garage at night,” Neale suggested. “I warrant no thieves will take it.”
Mr. Howbridge, while he was about it, had had a cement block garage built on the rear of the Stower premises facing Willow Street, for the housing of the Corner House girls’ motor car.
“Mr. Collinger’s auto was stolen right on the street,” said Agnes, doubtfully.
“That’s the worst of these flivvers,” retorted Neale, with a grin. “People are apt to come along and pick ’em up absent-mindedly and go off with them. Say! have you heard the latest?”
“What about?” asked Agnes, dreamily.
“About the flivver. Do you know what the chickens say when one of ’em goes by?”
“No,” declared the girl.
“Cheep! Cheep! Cheep!” mimicked the boy.
Agnes giggled. Then she said: “But Mr. Collinger’s wasn’t one of those cheap cars. It was a runabout; but it cost him a lot of money.”
“But that freckled-faced young man, Neale —do you suppose he could be the one Mrs. Heard said was seen driving the stolen car away from the court house?”
“Why, how should I know?” demanded Neale. “I’m no seventh son of a seventh son.”
“I wish we had seen a constable out there in the grove and had had him arrested.”
“What for? On what charge?” cried Neale, wonderingly.
“Why, because he spoke to Ruth and me. Then he could be held while his record was looked up. Maybe Mr. Collinger could have recovered his car by that means.”
“Cricky!” ejaculated the boy. “You’ve been reading the police court reports in the newspapers, I believe, Aggie.”
“Well! that’s what they do,” declared the girl, confidently.
“Maybe so. But you couldn’t have had the fellow arrested for speaking to you. You shouldn’t have been around the dance floor if you wanted to escape that. But, perhaps that freckled rascal is one of the thieves, and maybe he can be traced. Mrs. Heard will tell her nephew and he will attend to it – no fear!”
“But it would be just great, Neale, if we could do something toward recovering the car and getting the thieves arrested,” said Agnes who, as Neale often said, if she went into a thing, went into it all over!
They had not much time just then, however, to give to the mystery of the county surveyor’s lost automobile. Final examinations were coming on and the closing of school would be the next week but one.
Even Dot was busy with school work, although she was not very far advanced in her studies; and during these last few days she was released from her classes in the afternoon earlier than the other Corner House girls.
Sometimes she walked toward Meadow Street, which was across town from the Corner House and in a poorer section of Milton, with some of her little school friends before coming home; and so she almost always met Sammy Pinkney loafing along Willow Street on returning.
Sammy did not go to school this term. Scarlet fever had left this would-be pirate so weak and pale that the physician had advised nothing but out-of-doors for him until autumn.
Sammy, in some ways, was a changed boy since his serious illness. He was much thinner and less robust looking, of course; but the changes in him were not all of a physical nature. For one thing, he was not so rough with his near-neighbors, the Corner House girls. They had been very kind to him while he was ill, and his mother was always singing their praises. Besides, the other boys being in school, Sammy was lonely and was only too glad as a usual thing to
