ling back the way he had come.

"If you wouldn't mind walking along a little way," said the man eagerly.
"I'm a stranger here, and----"

"Oh, I'll go with you," offered Joe, good-naturedly. "I'm not in any
hurry."

Be careful, Joe! Be careful!

CHAPTER XXVI

ADRIFT

"There," said Baseball Joe, coming to a halt at a dark street corner,
the stranger close beside him, "if you go up that way, and turn as I
told you to, it will take you directly to the Reading Terminal."

"I don't know how to thank you," mumbled the other. He seemed to be
fumbling in his pocket. "I'll give you my card," he went on. "If you are
ever in San Francisco----"

But it was not a card that he pulled from the inner pocket of his coat.
It was a rag, that bore a strange, faint odor. Joe stepped back, but not
quickly enough. He suspected something wrong, but he was too late.

An instant later the stranger had thrown one powerful arm about
the young pitcher, and, with his other hand he pressed the
chloroform-saturated rag to Joe's nose and mouth.

Joe tried to cry out, and struggled to free himself. But his senses
seemed leaving him under the influence of the powerful drug.

At that moment, as though it had been timing itself to the movements of
the man who had followed Joe, there drove up a large ramshackle cab, and
out of it jumped two men.

"Did you get him, Wes?" one asked eagerly.

"I sure did. Here, help me. He's gone off. Get him into the cab."

Poor Joe's senses had all but left him. He was an inert mass, but he
could hear faintly, and he recognized the voice of Shalleg.

He tried to rouse himself, but it was as though he were in a heavy
sleep, or stupor. He felt himself being lifted into a cab. The door
slammed shut, and then he was rattled away over the cobbles.

"I wonder what they're going to do with me?" Joe thought. He had enough
of his brain in working order to do that. Once more he tried to
struggle.

"Better tie him up," suggested a voice he now recognized as that of the
fellow who had twisted his arm on the street car.

"Yes, I guess we had," agreed Shalleg. "And then to the Delaware with
him!"

Joe was too weak, and too much under the influence of the drug, to care
greatly what they did with him--that is, in a sense, though a feeling of
terror took possession of him at the words.

"The river!" gasped Wessel. "I thought you said there'd be no violence,
Shalleg."

"And there won't!" promised the leader