and whispered to Bessie, "He's welcome to her." Then he spoke aloud
again. "I may be running over to see Walt one of these days. He and I
are pretty good friends--for cousins. Seems to me he told me somethin'
about an ice-cream festival over there at the Methodist Church. I might
run over to that."

"I wish you would," said Bessie, laughing. "All the girls are going, I'm
sure--all our Camp Fire Girls."

"What, more of you girls!" said Bill, seeming to be surprised.

"Yes, indeed. There are a whole lot over at the farm. They'll be glad to
see you, especially when we tell them how good you were to us, and how
you saved us from that nasty Jake Hoover."

"Oh, I just enjoyed beating him," said Burns. "Wish he'd put up more of
a fight, though. I'd have licked him just the same, but it would have
been more like a real fight. Well, I don't hear that train yet, and the
station's just around that next bend. Not much of a place--Tecumseh.
Hasn't any right to such a fine name, I think."

The prospect when they rounded the turn in the road bore out his slur on
the village of Tecumseh. It wasn't much of a place--scarcely more than
the village part of Hedgeville, as Bessie saw. The station was there,
and two or three stores and a post office. But Bessie and Dolly were
more interested in the man who was sitting gloomily, watch in hand, on
the station steps. It was Holmes, and his face, when he saw them, was a
picture.

"Well, how in the world did you get here?" he asked, angrily. "That was
a fine trick you played on me, running off, and leaving me to worry
about you! You might have been killed."

"I like your nerve!" exclaimed Dolly, before Bessie could answer,
surprised by the cool way in which Holmes tried to shift the blame to
their shoulders. "Look here, Mr. Holmes, we know all about you, and why
you took us on that ride. You wanted to get Bessie into the state where
she came from, so that Farmer Weeks could keep her there!"

A look of black anger swept across his face, handsome enough when he did
not let his real character stand revealed.

"Yes, there's no use trying to deceive us any more with your smooth
talk, Mr. Holmes," said Bessie. "I listened to what you said over the
telephone, and we heard you telling Jake Hoover how to catch us when we
went to take the trolley, too."

"Yes," countered Dolly. "If you had been as smart as you thought you
were, you could have caught us then--we were within a few feet of you
whil