Chamberlain and Aleck, triumphantly leading the horse, came back in time to see the settling cloud of dust.

“Mr. Chamberlain—­Mr. Van Camp!” cried Agatha.  “They’ve gone!  They’ve got away!”

“Who’s got away?” demanded Chamberlain.

“All of them!” groaned Agatha, as she sank down on the piazza steps.

“Jimminy Christmas!” ejaculated Mr. Straker.  “This beats any ten-twenty-thirty I ever saw.  Regular Dick Deadwood game!  And he’s run off with my new racer!”

“What!” yelled Chamberlain.  “Did that bloomin’ sheriff let that bloomin’ rascal get away?”

“He isn’t anybody I’d care to keep!” chuckled Straker.  “But you know that new racer’s worth something.”

“Did Chatelard go off in that machine?” again inquired Chamberlain slowly and distinctly of the two women.

“Precisely,” said Melanie, while Agatha’s bowed head nodded.

“By Jove, that sheriff’s a duffer!  Here, Van, give me the horse.”  And with the words Chamberlain grabbed Little Simon’s best roadster, mounted him bareback, and turned his head up the road.

“I’ll catch him yet!” he yelled back.

But he didn’t.  Three miles farther along he came upon the wreck.  The racer was lying on its side in a ditch which recent rains had converted into a substantial volume of mire and mud.  The white machine was drawn cosily up under a spreading hemlock farther on, but Mr. Hand and the sheriff were nowhere in sight.

As Chamberlain stopped to gaze on the overturned car, he heard the crashing of underbrush in the woods near by.  The steps came nearer.  It was evident the chase was up; they were off the scent and obliged to return.

“Humph!” grunted Chamberlain, and for once the clear springs of his disposition were made turbid with satire.  “We’re all a pack of bloomin’ asses—­that’s what we are.  What in hell’s the matter with us!”

While he was tying the horse to a tree, Hand appeared, silent, with an unfathomable disgust written on his countenance.  As usual, he who was the least to blame came in for the hottest of the censure; and yet, there was a sort of fellowship indicated by Chamberlain’s extraordinary arraignment of them both.  He was scarcely known ever to have been profane, but at this moment he searched for wicked words and interspersed his speech with them recklessly, if not with skill.  It is the duty of the historian to expurgate.

“I don’t know just how you happen to be in this game,” pronounced Chamberlain hotly, “but all I’ve got to say is you’re an ass—­an infernal ass.”

Hand, rolling up his sleeves, remained silent.

“I suppose if you’d had a perfectly good million-dollar bank-note, you’d have let it blow away—­piff! right out of your hands!” he fumed.  “Or the title deed to Mount Olympus—­or a ticket to a front seat in the New Jerusalem.  That’s all it amounts to.  Catch an eel, only to let him slip through your fingers—­eh, you!”