“Decidedly I am! Do you suppose we’d all be chasing over the country this morning looking for my niece and offering rewards if we knew where she is? I live on a schooner to keep away from trouble, and this is what that girl has got me into! What’s your name anyhow?” He quickly decided against telling his name. At that moment Gadsby’s burly frame became visible across Main Street, and Farrington shot out a side door and sprinted up an alley at his best speed. He struck the railroad track at a point beyond the station where it curved through the hills, and followed it for a mile before stopping to breathe. As he approached a highway he heard a motor and flung himself down in the grass at the side of the track. The driver of the car checked its speed and one of his companions stood up and surveyed the long stretch of track. The blue glint of gun barrels caught Farrington’s eye. There were three men in the machine and he guiltily surmised that they were deputy sheriffs or constables looking for him. He stuck his nose into the ground and did not lift his head again until the sounds of the motor faded away in the distance. Probably no roads were safe, and even in following the railroad he might walk into an ambush. He abandoned the ties for flight over a wooded hill. It was hard going and the underbrush slapped him savagely in the face. A higher hill tempted him and a still higher one, and he came presently to the top of a young mountain. He sat for a time on a fallen tree and considered matters. In his perturbed state of mind it seemed to him that the faint clouds of dust he saw rising in the roads below were all evidences of pursuit. He picked out familiar landmarks and judged that his flight over the hills had brought him within four miles of his home. Thoughts of home, and a tub, and clean clothes, pleased him, and he resolutely began the descent. The only way he could free himself from suspicion was by finding Arabella. And how could he find Arabella when he was likely at any moment to be run down by a country constable with a shotgun? And as for meeting Arabella at four o’clock, he realized now that he had stupidly allowed the girl to slip away from him without designating a meeting place. So far as he knew, he was the only person who had seen Arabella since her escape from Miss Collingwood’s schooner. It might be well for him to volunteer to the Bannings such information as he had; but the more he thought of this the less it appealed to him. It would be difficult to give a plausible account of his meeting with Arabella at the tea house; and, moreover, he shrank from a betrayal of the light-hearted follower of the silver trumpet. As a gentleman he could give no version of the affair that would not place all the blame on himself; and this involved serious risks.