The Motor Girls at Lookout Beach Part 16

"Not half as bad as your new gloves. They give me a regular spell of the pig skin fever. I'll bet they're made out of junk, and you got stuck. Three dollars for a pair of gloves to save your lily-white hands--your lily-white hands!" and he ended in the strain of the familiar college song.

"Well, I'll be going," said Jack. "See to it that neither of you fellows do so much primping that we miss our--guess," and with that the three young men parted, each going his own way to make ready for the run after the motor girls.

CHAPTER XIV

LOST ON THE ROAD

"Look out there, Walter. Do you want the _Comet_ to run into the _Whirlwind_?"

"We are getting pretty close," answered Walter, shutting off the power and coasting with the emergency brake partly on, for he found he was covering a hill too quickly. "I guess we can run alongside here. It's a good enough road."

Jack brought the _Get There_ in line with the other runabout. "My, but that shower is coming up quickly. I'll bet the girls are about scared to death," he said. "Cora isn't particularly afraid of thunder showers, but I know Belle is."

"Then, they will have to put up somewhere before they get to Wayside,"

remarked Ed. "That thunder is not far away."

As he said this a blinding flash of lightning confirmed the statement.

"I wonder if that chauffeur Mr. Robinson hired, knows any place to put up at?" asked Jack, his voice showing some anxiety.

"Well, there doesn't happen to be any place on this road," replied Ed.

"I came along here last week, and the only thing like a hotel I could find, was an old roadhouse over on a back lane."

"My, but that's sharp lightning!" exclaimed Walter. "Guess I had better get ahead, Jack. It's safer now."

For a mile or so the runabouts went along, "between the flashes," as Ed put it. Then the rain came, pelting and with a tempestuous wind.

"Where's the turn, Ed?" asked Jack. "We'd better hurry on and overtake the girls now. I don't feel like risking it in this downpour. That fellow from the garage may not know more than he has to, and I promised Mr. Robinson I'd sort of look after the girls."

"Listen!" exclaimed Walter. "I don't hear the cars, do you?"

Both runabouts slowed up, and their occupants did not speak for some seconds.

"But where could they have gone to?" questioned Jack, as their strained ears failed to catch the familiar sound of a machine that had been running on ahead.

All the joy of the stolen ride instantly vanished. Jack Kimball, Ed Foster, and Walter Pennington were no longer the jolly, laughing youths, chasing the motor girls. They were three very much frightened young men, for the girls, and the car in which the other members of the Robinson family had been riding, could neither be seen nor heard!

Through the pouring rain the boys dashed on. The rays of light from the search-lamps revealed nothing but a stretch of mud that, every moment, became deeper and more treacherous!

Then came a fork in the road, and beside the turn, a lane offered a possible clue to the sudden departure of the girls from the main highway.

"We've got to get out and look for their tracks," said Jack. "I suppose they put on all kinds of speed to get away from the rain."

But although the other cars must have pa.s.sed over that place somewhere, and not more than half an hour before, not a mark of the heavy wheels could be discerned in the deep, dark mud, though Jack took off one of the oil lamps and flashed it across the road.

"Golly!" exclaimed Ed, in earnest despair.

"Which way?" asked Walter, deferring now to the much-alarmed brother of Cora Kimball.

"I wish I knew," replied he, with a sigh.

"Suppose we make straight for the Wayside?" suggested Ed. "They may have known of the roadhouse."

"How far to Wayside?" asked Jack.

"Five miles from this turn. See, there it is on the signpost," and he flashed his lamp on the board that marked the fork in the road.

"Then we had better put on speed and make that," declared Jack, "and if we do not find them there, we will have to turn back, that's all."

"Didn't Cora have any idea you were going to follow?" asked Walter, as he got back in his car and then shot ahead close to the already moving _Get There_.

"Not the least," replied Jack. "That comes of our foolish way of doing school-boy tricks. It seems to me the joke is turned on us this time."

"Hope it is," declared Walter warmly. "I, for one, am now quite willing to go in the kindergarten, if that's all we have to do to make amends."

"I can't see where we missed them," almost shouted Jack, for the noise of the thunder and rain added to the distance of sound between the cars.

"Right at the spot where you told me to slow up," answered Walter. "I heard them then, but not after that."

Each driver now put on all possible speed. It was a perilous ride. The mud splashed up in the very faces of the young men, the lights that flashed on the road were misleading, because of the almost continuous flashes of lightning, and the danger of "skidding" increased with every mile of the race.

"Who were in the hired car?" called Walter.

"Mrs. Robinson and her guest from the West, and the driver. I wish now I had gone over and fixed it, so that they had the right man at the wheel," yelled Jack. "I don't know a thing about this fellow."

"What's his name?" asked Ed.

"Bindle or something like that," was Jack's answer.

Ed gave Walter a tug at the sleeve. "Don't say anything to Jack," he said, quietly, "but that's the very fellow who drove the Wakleys when they went over into the ditch."

The shrill whistle of a train startled them.

"Any other danger likely to crop up?" asked Jack. "This will surely give the girls all the experience they want, I'm afraid!"

But a few more miles and they must reach the inn.

If only they would find the party there safe and sound!

None of the boys was what might be called nervous, but when it came to possible danger for the motor girls--Jack's sister, his friends and his chum's friends--somehow a fear seized each of the three young men; a fear to which they had thought themselves almost immune.

"There's the lights from the Wayside," announced Jack, a little later, and then they turned their cars into the broad, private roadway.

Jack was first to reach the hotel office, but Ed and Walter were almost at his heels.