olice station while you boys made
this trip. In that way we could 'ave had a double chance of catching
those bandits. If everything had gone smoothly, I might even have
beaten you boys to the scene of the hold-up with an auto load of
police. I could 'ave left word, too, for someone to call up Mr.
Stanlock's office and warn him, if by any cause he had been delayed."

"I don't think much of that suggestion," replied Clifford; "for, if
they haven't got him started by this time, they're not likely to get
him going their way tonight. But the other'd 'a' been a good one. It's
too bad you didn't think of it sooner."

"Too late now," said Ernie. "We've got to make the best of it."

"Who do you suppose those two men are that we saw come out of the
cave?" Miles Berryman inquired.

"The chances are ninety-nine out of a hundred that this affair is
connected directly with the strike," Clifford replied, with confident
assurance. "The highwaymen who plotted this scheme doubtless belong to
the rougher element of the strikers. They are really dangerous men,
and the community would be much safer if they were lodged in prison."

"How do you suppose they got your uncle to come away out here at the
time when he usually starts home for dinner--that is, if he really
came this way?" asked Hal Ettelson.

"That's the very thing that's bothering me most," Clifford replied,
with puzzled air. "Uncle is usually pretty shrewd, and I am pretty
certain that people who try to put anything over on him generally find
that they have a hard job on their hands."

"I'd take it, from the note Jerry found, that this is a decoy game
they're trying to work," Ernie remarked.

"It'd have to be a sharp one to get my uncle," declared Clifford.
"He's a very clever business man."

"The smartest men get caught once in a while," was Ernie's sage
remark.

"That must have been a chauffeur who wrote that note," observed Johnny
St. John. "It read as if a chauffeur was the brains of this plot. If
we get there on time, he won't have much to chauffeur it" (show for
it).

"Oh, Johnny Twice!" groaned Earl Hamilton. "Don't spoil your good
deed of finding that note by springing any more of that stuff. You're
taking an unfair advantage of us, for we can't stop now to duck you in
a snowdrift."

The road was not broken all the way for good walking, so that the boys
were forced to put forth their best efforts in order to reach the
place of the plotted ambush on time.