lever,
he could make a frightful nuisance of himself."

"I think he'll have a bad time when Mr. Holmes and Farmer Weeks find out
that he let us get away, Dolly. I don't know what sort of a hold they've
got on him, but it was easy to tell there was something, from the way
Mr. Holmes spoke."

"Yes, indeed! And Mr. Holmes meant just what he said when he threatened
him, too. The only reason he pretended afterwards that he was joking was
so that Jake wouldn't be too frightened to do anything, don't you think
so?"

"Yes, I do, Dolly. I wonder if Miss Eleanor and Mr. Jamieson will
believe that I was right about Mr. Holmes now? They laughed at me before
when I said that I wouldn't trust him, and was so sure that he had
something to do with Zara's being carried off--"

"Why, what's that, Bessie? I hadn't heard of that at all."

"Oh, I forgot! You don't know about that, do you? Well, this is a good
chance to tell you."

So Bessie told Dolly something of the strange and involved affair of
Zara and her father, and of Zara's mysterious disappearance from the
Mercer house in the middle of the night.

"I'll bet they fooled her, just the way Mr. Holmes fooled me," said
Dolly, excitedly. "He looks so nice, and he's so smooth and clever, and
he talks to you as if he wanted to be your best friend. I don't believe
they carried her off. I think they fooled her, so that she was willing
to go with them."

"That's just what I think, Dolly, and this business today makes me worry
about her more than ever. I think we ought to try to get her away from
them and back with us just as soon as we can."

"I suppose they wanted you because you know too much," said Dolly,
thoughtfully. "They probably thought that you would try to get Zara away
from them."

"I think there's more than that, though, Dolly," said Bessie, her eyes
shining with excitement. "I don't know what it is, but I've just got a
sort of funny feeling that they know something about me that I don't
know, and that they don't want me or my real friends to find out. I'm
going to be just as careful as I can be, anyhow. Have you got that map
we took from the car? I want to see just where this car will take us."

Dolly produced the map, and they bent their heads over it. No one on the
car seemed to be paying much attention to them. There were only two or
three passengers, and Bessie thought they had not seen the manner in
which they had boarded the car. But the conductor, coming aro