John Lawdon, the snappy young secretary of the club, always eager to be accommodating, told Billy all this without so much as asking to whom he was speaking. He had helped Pick and Soapy look over the maps, he said. Yes, Fred Perth was with them. He had seen all three drive away. So delighted to have obtained a positive key to the Trio's movements that he could hardly say "Thank you," without betraying excitement in his voice, Billy hung up the receiver. Then he waited, but not long was he kept in suspense. The telephone rang. Mr. Wilder's stenographer responded. "It is for you, Mr. Worth,"--with a peculiar little accent on the Mr. It was Phil Way, calling in from Star Lake as had been agreed he should do. Promptly and with many a laugh over the success of their ruse, Billy reported all he had learned. "Good enough!" exclaimed Phil. "We will run over a lot of cross roads and finally back to town before noon, giving them a route to trace that will keep 'em out all day." "Hurry along! They'll be there soon!" Worth replied, eagerly. "Get a good start ahead and we'll watch for them as they come back! Let them see just a smile in the corner of an eye, you know! Better than to give 'em the laugh right out." Almost to the letter was the plan of the Auto Boys consummated. The hitch in their program followed the early discovery by Gaines and his company that they themselves had made a serious mistake or else had been made the victims of a trick. That one or the other proposition was true dawned slowly upon them as they painfully traced the car they sought by the tracks of its wheels, or, where these were lost in the dust, by many inquiries at farmhouses and of fellow travelers upon the road. "If it was just a low-down scheme to send us wild-goose chasing, they'll be hanging around somewhere to gloat, you bet!" Fred Perth suggested, as it became painfully apparent that the Auto Boys' machine had simply made an extended series of turns, then returned to town. "Anyhow, it's all the more reason we've got to upset their old secret tour," said Gaines, with determination. Pick was driving. "I'll run her around the suburbs to the South road, then up to your house through the back streets, Soapy," he proposed. "They'll be watching for us to come in through town, if this _was_ just one of their measly tricks." "Her" being the automobile and being also a well-behaved car, "she" made no protest of any sort to the longer way home, as Pickton suggested. Soapy and Perth likewise agreeing, a half circle was made around the town. It was nearly two o'clock when the Roadster, with the water fairly boiling out of the radiator, rumbled into the Gaines carriage house.