“Gosh, that fellow can coax some speed out of that machine of his!” cried the man at the wheel.  “But if you young ladies don’t mind a little danger, we may catch him yet.”

“Oh, please don’t think about us,” cried Betty, her hands clutching the back of the seat, her eyes straining after the flying speck that seemed to be growing smaller every second.  “Oh, we must catch him,—­we must!  It would be awful to lose him now!”

“Well, here goes,” responded the man behind the wheel, and under his skillful touch the machine leapt forward like a spirited horse at the touch of the lash.

“That’s it, that’s it!” cried Mollie, almost beside herself with excitement.  “Just hear that engine purr!  He can’t get away from us now!”

“Oh, if we could only take him back to Camp Liberty with us!”

“I thought so,” said the chauffeur, and even in their excitement they had time to look in surprise at his back.

“Wh-what did you think?” stammered Betty.

“That you were the girls up at the Hostess House that everybody is talking about,” he told her, while the girls fairly gasped with surprise at this proof of their widespread fame.  “That’s why I didn’t ask questions but just did as I was told,” he added.  And somehow they knew, though they could not see his face, that he was grinning.  “You see, I’d always heard that you most always got what you set out to get, and I didn’t waste time arguin’,” he finished.

The girls laughed hysterically, and Betty said, with a funny little inflection: 

“Sounds as if we were very strong-minded.  But we don’t care about that,” she added, once more fixing her gaze anxiously on the road before them, “if we can only catch that man.”

“May I ask who he is, miss?” asked the man.

“He’s—­he’s a—­criminal!” returned Betty, her little fists clenched fiercely.

“A criminal?” he repeated with interest.  “May I ask what kind?”

“A murderer,” cried Mollie fiercely, adding, as the man started and the girls looked at her in surprise:  “Well, he might just as well have been.  He didn’t even stop to see whether he was or not, which is about the same thing.”

There was a sound from the front seat that sounded suspiciously like a chuckle, but not being quite sure, the girls could do nothing whatever about it.

“But look—­he’s getting away from us!” wailed Amy suddenly, and once more all their attention was focused on the chase.

And, quite suddenly, while they watched, the motorcyclist disappeared from view as if the earth had opened and swallowed him up.

A few seconds later, with a grinding of brakes, the car stopped at the spot where he had disappeared, and the girls looked at one another despairingly.

The path that he had taken seemed no more than a broad foot path through the woods, so narrow that no machine could follow him, and of course there was no chance of catching him on foot.