ce more answered Chief Fobes' "Here, you! Step up!"
upon seeing four boys confronting him. He leaned with hands upon the
steel bars as he had done the day before.

"Good, honest automobile grease on your hands, mister," remarked Billy
Worth, noticing the fellow's fingers and especially his black nails.

Coster quickly put his hands down but volunteered no remark. Then, as if
he feared being suspected of a desire to conceal something, he seized
the bars again as before.

"He's the man we saw," said Alex Hipp, when with Chief Fobes they all
had reached the refreshing outer air. "At least I think so."

"Thinkin' don't go much from the standpoint of the law," the officer
answered. Neither Hipp nor Alfred Earnest could state positively that
Coster was the person they had seen on the lonely road that rainy
afternoon. Billy and Paul drove them to their respective homes in the
Torpedo.

"So we are knocked out of all we thought we had found yesterday,"
observed Jones, droopingly, on the homeward way.

"Maybe not," Worth returned, deep in thought. "Do you see how the clutch
pedal of the car has pressed against the side of the sole on my shoe
till the leather is curved in half an inch or more?"

Paul said he did. Looking at Worth's shoes, then his own, he added:
"That's nothing new. Mine is the same way."

"I know it is," said Billy. "And the sole of Coster's left boot is
marked in the same way, too."

Paul saw at once the significance of this fact, the evidence that Chief
Fobes' prisoner was an automobile man. "Billy," he said earnestly, "we
are gettin' some warm!"

Try as they would to "get busy," Worth and Jones found themselves
accomplishing nothing as the afternoon wore away. Mr. Fobes was becoming
quite impatient over their inquiries and they thought best not to visit
him. Willie Creek was busy with some urgent repair work. There appeared
no course to pursue--nothing to do--but wait. Impatient for word from
Phil or Dave, restless in their inactivity, the two boys sat for a long
time at the large open window of the hotel. A stranger entered.

As the young man--he seemed to be twenty-one or two, perhaps--sat down
near the boys, he remarked that he was waiting while his car was
undergoing some repairs at the garage. A conversation concerning
automobiles was the most natural result imaginable. Put two or more
motor enthusiasts together and invariably they will soon be talking.

The newcomer was from Texas, he said,