“All right!” he shouted back, starting along the road.

Together he and Del Mar managed to scramble up the embankment to the road and, one at each handle of the trunk, they carried it back to the car, piling it in the back.

The improvised chauffeur started to take his place at the wheel and Del Mar had his foot on the running-board to get beside him, when the now unbearded stranger suddenly swung about and struck Del Mar full in the face.  It sent him reeling back into the dust.

The engine of the car had been running and before Del Mar could recover consciousness, the stranger had shot the car ahead, leaving Del Mar prone in the roadway.

. . . . . . .

The train, with Bailey on it, had not gained much speed, yet it was a perilous undertaking to leap.  Still, it was more so now to remain.  The baggageman stirred.  It was now a case of murder or a getaway.

Bailey jumped.

Scratched and bruised and shaken, he scrambled to his feet in the briars along the track.  He staggered up to the road, pulled himself together, then hurried back as fast as his barked shins would let him.

He came to the spot which he recognized as that where he had thrown off the trunk.  He saw the trampled and broken bushes and made for the road.

He had not gone far when he saw, far down, Del Mar suddenly attacked and thrown down, apparently by his own chauffeur.  Bailey ran forward, but it was too late.  The car was gone.

As he came up to Del Mar lying outstretched in the road, Del Mar was just recovering consciousness.

“What was the matter?” he asked.  “Was he a traitor?”

He caught sight of the real chauffeur on the ground, stripped.

Del Mar was furious.  “No,” he swore, “it was that confounded gray friar again, I think.  And he has the trunk, too!”

. . . . . . .

Speeding up the road the former masquerader and motor-cyclist stopped at last.

Eagerly he leaped out of Del Mar’s car and dragged the trunk over the side regardless of the enamel.

It was the work of only a moment for him to break the lock with a pocket jimmy.

One after another he pulled out and shook the clothes until frocks and gowns and lingerie lay strewn all about.

But there was not a thing in the trunk that even remotely resembled the torpedo model.

The stranger scowled.

Where was it?

CHAPTER VIII

THE VANISHING MAN

Del Mar had evidently, by this time, come to the conclusion that Elaine was the storm centre of the peculiar train of events that followed the disappearance of Kennedy and his wireless torpedo.

At any rate, as soon as he learned that Elaine was going to her country home for the summer, he took a bungalow some distance from Dodge Hall.  In fact, it was more than a bungalow, for it was a pretentious place surrounded by a wide lawn and beautiful shade trees.