CHAPTER XVI

RUN TO EARTH

It was early dusk when Clif pulled up at the side of the road, shut off his engine and descended from the shabby flivver. There was still a dull glow in the western sky, but it was fading fast and the shadows were deepening. Although he had left the field before the end of practice and changed from football togs to his present regalia of trousers and sweater and cap in something approaching record time, he was still in doubt as to whether he had reached the turnpike ahead of his quarry. He had made the little car hustle, and it didn’t seem possible that he had arrived too late, yet, if he hadn’t, where was the Camel? Clif looked back along the road, but it was empty and silent. He sat down on the running board and thought rather sadly of supper. He was already hungry enough to eat an ox, he assured himself, and goodness only knew what his condition would be by the time he saw the present adventure to its end and got back to school! And when he did get back it would probably be too late for anything to eat! He began to hope that the Camel had eluded him, in which case, after waiting where he was long enough to satisfy himself on that point, he could run the flivver back to the village and return to school in plenty of time to――

These pleasant reflections were suddenly disturbed. Far back on the narrow road he had traveled from the direction of the school two weak, lemon-yellowish points of light appeared in the purple twilight. Clif looked, sighed and arose. When the Camel went by he was to pretend to be puzzling over a balky engine. He lifted the hood and assumed the familiar attitude of the stalled motorist, in spite of the fact that, had there been anything wrong with the engine, he wouldn’t have been able to find the trouble by peering into that dark and smelly cavern. The sound of the approaching car grew louder and its lights played wanly against the bare trees beyond Clif’s silent chariot. Then, with a squeaking of springs and a rattle and hum the oncoming car slowed slightly for the corner, slewed to the left and bounded on again.

“Huh,” thought Clif, “he wouldn’t even offer assistance, the low life! One more score against you, Funny Face!” This, considering that Clif hadn’t wanted him to stop, was a trifle unreasonable. The borrowed car was a conservative. It didn’t hold with these newfangled notions like self-starters. So Clif had to wind it, and he was still winding it when the other car was represented by a tiny red speck afar down the turnpike. But it came to life eventually and Clif vaulted over the side and began the pursuit. By calling on every bit of power contained under the shaking hood he managed to cut down the lead of the other flivver within the next mile. He didn’t go too close to it, however, but remained some three hundred yards behind, accommodating his pace to the Camel’s and watching the ruby light swaying about the road. Evidently the Camel was not a very accomplished driver, for the car he occupied wandered from side to side in a most erratic fashion. Following that reflection came a most appalling thought. How, Clif demanded of himself, did he know that the driver of the other car _was_ the Camel?

It had been planned that he was to identify the boy with the funny chin as he went past at the corner back there; and do it without allowing the recognition to be mutual. But, even if he had looked――and he had purposely not looked for fear that the Camel might take alarm――it would have been impossible to identify any one in the half dark. So now it amounted to this: Clif was chasing some one who might or might not be the person he had set out to chase! At considerable risk of leaving the turnpike, none too wide at any point in its leisurely meanderings, he stretched his head around the side of the car and looked back. There was no one behind; or, at least, no one within sight. Oh, that just had to be the Camel ahead there! Nevertheless doubt continued to disturb him.

Belonging, as I have said, to the Old Régime, Clif’s vehicle had no speedometer. In brief, it possessed none of the modern improvements. Consequently Clif had to guess both at his speed and at the distance covered. He surmised the latter to be about three miles when it became apparent that the car ahead was slowing down. Clif slowed, too, until, finding himself in danger of bumping the other from the rear, he increased his speed a trifle and went by. He didn’t want to pass, but the other flivver had slowed to scarcely more than eight miles, and to have followed suit would have certainly apprised the Camel――if it was the Camel――that he was being pursued. As Clif chugged by he threw a careless glance to the right. The lone occupant of the other car was hardly more than a blur in the gloom, yet Clif was very certain that he was being stared at hard. He kept on until he was some two hundred yards ahead and then looked back. It wouldn’t do to let the Camel――and now he was practically certain that it was the Camel――turn around and escape. But the other car was coming along slowly, as though repenting of its former mad haste and determined to lead a better life. All well enough, reflected Clif, but now he was the one being trailed, and that was extremely silly!

He continued, however, maintaining a demure twenty-mile gait, for another half-mile or so. Then the turnpike merged into the wider ribbon of the state road and the hard, smooth paving glistened under the lights of the car. Clif stopped short and made pretense of looking for signs. There were plenty of them, although as usual they were more concerned with the merits of suspenders, self-rising flour, automobile oil and other merchandise than with the destination of the roads. But the ruse worked, for the Camel’s flivver passed again and, as though the driver had decided that his neighbor on the road was a harmless tourist, took up its former headlong flight. Clif grinned and followed.

Twenty-two miles distant lay Cotterville. At the present rate of speed, thought Clif, they would reach it about ten minutes to six. Well, if the Camel didn’t take too long in running to earth――of course it was foxes and not camels who ran to earth, but Clif saw no reason for being fussy about metaphors just now――he might be able to get back to school before seven. And if he could slip through the dining hall doors before they closed at that hour he would chance starving to death! Gee, a couple of slices of toast and a glass of milk would be wonderful! He couldn’t remember having been as hungry as he was now in months!

On and on went the two cars, a distance of from two to three hundred yards separating them. It really looked now as if the Camel was trying to throw off pursuit, for Clif had to get everything out of his flivver to keep the tail light ahead from running away into the darkness. Fortunately the road was wide, straight and at this time of evening fairly deserted. During the first four or five miles but two cars passed in the opposite direction and no horns from the rear warned Clif to make room. Clif didn’t know what the speed was, but he guessed both cars were doing forty, and he devoutly hoped that the worn tires beneath him would stand the strain. Now and then, but infrequently, he and the Camel were forced to slow down a trifle where a few buildings huddled together at some crossroad junction. It had either rained harder or continued later over this way, Clif concluded, for there were puddles along the sides of the road, and now and then, approaching too closely, water spattered the cracked wind shield and sodden leaves encouraged skidding. He had to hold the wheel pretty steady as Loomis came into sight, for a car track, debouching from a side street, contested the right of way, its rails perched well above the road level.

Clif believed now that the Camel was aware that he was being trailed. Otherwise, or so it seemed to the pursuer, he wouldn’t have driven so recklessly. After all, if the Camel had only to travel as far as Cotterville he had plenty of time to reach that town before six o’clock, and he needn’t have taken such chances as he had. Clif recalled Loomis as being a place of some size, with a bridge across a rocky river bed――occasionally showing water――a factory of some sort that stretched for a good block along the main road and numerous small alleylike streets leading left and right. It wouldn’t be a difficult feat for the Camel to turn into one of those streets and give him the shake, Clif reflected; especially if the Camel knew the village. So, when the Camel reduced his forty-mile speed to something about thirty, Clif didn’t follow his example at once. He waited until scarcely more than a dozen yards intervened between the two cars, and presently he was glad he had done so. A few stores, still open for business, a fire house, a white Town Hall went past on the left and the factory loomed ahead, its hundreds of windows dark. Just beyond was the bridge, in fair sight under the light of an arc lamp. But suddenly the flivver in the lead swerved sharply to the right and was gone!

Clif jammed on his brake, peering ahead. Then, with a disconcerting jar the car slid down a narrow, rutted alley in the shadow of the factory, barely escaped a board fence and went bumping along the edge of the river. It was no more than a mud hole of a place, one side guarded by the sagging fence, the other littered with empty packing cases and all sorts of rubbish from the factory. Under the wheels of the bouncing car a rotting wooden pavement had succeeded the earth, and occasionally a plank had fallen away and left a yawning hiatus of six or eight inches, into which the tires descended with a thud and from which they emerged with a heave that made Clif clutch the wheel desperately to keep from flying out. Once he barely grazed the end of a huge truck that had been left standing beside a loading platform. Fortunately his lights picked it up in time to allow him to swerve aside. When he had time to look ahead he could see the beckoning tail lamp of the Camel’s flivver bobbing and swaying in the darkness. Then it disappeared once more. Following, Clif manipulated a corner on two wheels, felt a mud guard strike an obstruction of some sort and then went charging up a steepish incline that was evidently paved with cobbles. The Camel turned to the right, fifty yards ahead, and Clif followed, and, lo, he was back on the main road again, the factory was beside him and the bridge still ahead! He had, it appeared, completely encircled the factory.

He found a more comfortable location on the seat and settled again for less exciting stretches. The Camel whirred over the bridge, defying speed laws, and Clif followed, though a bit more circumspectly. Across the river, the trolley tracks disappeared and tree-enveloped residences held for a block or two. Then came the open road once more, with the Camel again doing his forty. Clif’s luminous watch dial proclaimed the time as five-thirty-two, and he judged that the journey was more than half over. He let the Camel retrieve some of his former lead but was careful not to allow him too much. And then, as suddenly as before, the red tail light was gone.

Puzzled for an instant, Clif sent his complaining chariot forward at its best pace. But then the explanation came to him. The Camel had not left the state road, but had doused his lights! Well, if he wanted to take the risk, all right; fortunately, Clif didn’t have to. And perhaps the risk wasn’t so great, after all, for the road passed through open country here and the starlight was not filtered through the trees as it had been further back. In any case, the Camel kept his pace, and Clif, even with the aid of his lights, had to hustle to keep the dim form of the other car in sight. In such manner they passed a little hamlet where, beyond an uncurtained casement, Clif saw a tall, thin man lifting food to his mouth. It was the briefest sort of a vision, but it was painfully clear, and right then Clif’s flivver almost went into a telephone pole! Recovering control, he wondered sadly if they would have given him food after dragging his body from the wreck!

The approach of Cotterville was heralded by the appearance on the road of more traffic and Clif was forced to use all his skill in guiding the car past vehicles going in the opposite direction or moving more slowly toward the town. The danger of losing the Camel increased the nearer they got to Cotterville, and Clif took more than one chance during those last two miles in the attempt to keep the other car in sight. Fortunately, the Camel had had to put his lights on again, and by now Clif could have picked that particular tail lamp out of a hundred! And so Cotterville’s main street began, brilliantly lighted for a half-dozen blocks, well lined with parked automobiles, busy with the bustling of last-minute shoppers. An illuminated clock pointed its hands at eleven minutes to six. The Camel dodged on, past the green, past the colorful front of a moving picture theater, and swerved into a tree-lined residence street. Clif’s familiarity with Cotterville was not great, but he knew that the school lay in the direction taken now by the quarry. Some six or seven blocks further, after negotiating two turns, the leading flivver came to rest at last outside a building which had once served as a livery stable and now was quite evidently used as a garage. The pursuing car likewise stopped, stopped between street lamps in a veritable pocket of gloom, and very swiftly Clif turned off its lights and vaulted to the sidewalk.

In front of the garage a man sauntered from the open doorway and a few words were exchanged between him and the Camel. Then, as though he had never hurried in all his life, the Camel sauntered on. Clif, well concealed in the darkness, watched. The Camel reached the bole of a large tree some thirty feet beyond the garage and stepped behind it. He remained there for perhaps a dozen seconds, and then, evidently reassured, went on more briskly, slanting across the street toward where, a block distant, the Wolcott Academy grounds began. Perhaps the Camel was of an optimistic mind and believed what he wanted to. In which case he doubtless told himself that the person who had clung to him so closely all the way from the outskirts of Freeburg had merely been amusing himself by attempting to get to Cotterville first. After all, it isn’t likely that the Camel dreamed that his presence in the stand at football practice had aroused suspicion. Perhaps his concern at being trailed by the strange automobile had to do with the stories of hold-ups he had read in the newspapers. At all events, he showed no concern now as he made his way toward the school gate.

After allowing him a fair start, Clif followed. When the Camel entered the grounds the amateur sleuth was no more than fifty paces behind. At Wolcott the buildings are scattered over a wide expanse of campus, and, since it lacked but a few minutes of six, once inside, Clif was only one of several dozens of youths moving along the paths. Most of the others were heading toward the dining hall, but the Camel made his way to a near-by dormitory and Clif went that way, too. He allowed the Camel to reach the staircase in the middle of the long corridor before he entered the doorway. When the Camel reached the second floor, Clif was on the stairs. When the Camel pushed open the door of a room some thirty feet along the hall Clif was watching, his head barely above the floor level. This procedure aroused considerable interest in a spindling youth on his way down from the floor above, but Clif returned his curious stare with a look so haughty that the youth scurried on. Other fellows appeared and there was a general opening and closing of doors throughout the dormitory, but no one paid any particular attention to the stranger as he walked to the portal of Number 27. The door was closed but not latched, and from within came the sound of a shrill, unmusical whistle. Before he applied his knuckles to the panel Clif read the two cards attached to the door with thumb tacks.

Mr. Charles Wayne Goddard.

Mr. Chester Fontaine Campbell.

Then he knocked, a voice said: “Yeah? Come on in!” and Clif pushed the portal open.

Oh, it was the Camel all right! Almost the first thing Clif saw was that trick chin. He still couldn’t believe that it was real and not formed of putty, for it stood forth like something thought of after the rest of the Camel had been put together. The Camel stared inquiringly, pausing in the act of applying a pair of military brushes to dampened hair.

“Goddard?” asked Clif.

“Not in. Gone to supper, I guess.”

“Oh,” said Clif, still looking fascinatingly at the chin, which waggled engagingly when the Camel spoke. “Well, I’ll drop around later.”

He started out, but the Camel was curious. “Who’ll I tell him called?” he asked.

Clif smiled engagingly. “Henry Ford,” he replied. Then he closed the door and went away, chuckling.

The Camel’s name was Campbell; Charles――no, Chester Fontaine Camp――

Clif clutched at the stair railing. Campbell! Wasn’t that pronounced Camel sometimes? Surely it was! Cambell or Camel, both ways. “The Campbells are coming!” Gosh, wasn’t it a scream? Wouldn’t Loring be tickled when he heard that the Camel really was a Camel? Clif grinned and chuckled all the way back to the flivver and was still grinning when he swung about and started back toward home.

The illuminated clock said six-six as he passed the green. He wondered if he could roll the car up to the school grounds in time to make a hasty flight through West and reach the dining hall before the doors were closed. It had taken him all of forty minutes to do that twenty-six miles on the outward trip, but going back he wouldn’t have to chase a tail light around the factory building in Loomis. If he hit it up pretty well he could make it, he thought.

There were fewer cars on the road now and he fairly gave the flivver its head once he was past the limits of the town. The little car complained in every joint as it bounded along, but the engine kept up a steady if agitated tune and the miles went past. Clif was a bit proud of his success, rather fancied himself as a detective. What was to come of his identification of the Camel he didn’t know, but he had done his part. He rattled across the bridge at Loomis, skirted the big factory and passed through the village at a speed that would have caused the town constable acute pain had he been on hand. But the constable was probably eating supper behind one of the dimly lighted windows that whizzed by.

Frequently Clif consulted his watch and found each time that he did so that he was doing better than when he had gone in the other direction. Perhaps, he told himself with a smile, automobiles were like horses in one thing: they went faster toward home than away from it! Only three other vehicles had passed him so far; two automobiles and a farmer’s wagon laden with boxes of vegetables; Clif guessed them to be cabbages. Consequently he was not overcautious as he neared one of the little hamlets a few miles beyond Loomis. There were no more than half a dozen houses and a store in it, and they stretched for many rods on each side of the road. The store was dark and few of the houses showed more than a glimmer of light. On the right stood an automobile, just beyond the store, and Clif’s headlights picked it up none too soon. He swerved sharply to avoid it, and then many things happened at once. Beyond the darkened car, a second and smaller car, hidden from Clif’s view, came to life and pulled abruptly into the road. Clif’s first knowledge of it came when other lights suddenly blended with his on the pavements. Then the car itself loomed directly in his path. There was no time to sound his horn, no time to use his brakes effectively. There was just one thing to do and Clif did it. He wrenched hard on the steering wheel and shot over to the left. There might be room and there might not. There wasn’t. The flivver went head-on into a tree.