Perhaps it was the quiet, unruffled and yet absolutely uncommunicative tones of the Auto Boys that fired Soapy Gaines' wrath. Like a pouter pigeon he swelled up. "Aw, sure, drive on!" he said to Perth, still at the wheel. "And don't you think," he added in a low tone, still pompous but threatening, too--"And don't you think that we won't make 'em get right down on their knees to us or wish they'd never left home." "Or both!" laughed Pickton in that unbearably rasping way. "Yes, or both," was the response, "and some more on top of that! I'm going into this thing right, now, just for that low-down answer of Worth's if nothing else--the little two-by-four!" "But yet--" It was Perth who would have spoken, and it was in his mind to say that he saw nothing particularly objectionable in Billy Worth's words; that his answer to Pick's observation was natural enough. "'But yet'? Just you keep your 'but yet' till later on. I'm talking now!" interrupted Soapy, savagely. "I'm talking now, I say!" The fact is, indeed, that Mr. Soapy Gaines was quite apt to talk too much. CHAPTER II A LITTLE PRACTICE IN STRATEGY It was a direct result of Gaines' tongue wagging much more loosely than reasonable discretion would have counseled, to say nothing of sound sense, that information concerning the scheming of himself and his fellow conspirators reached the Auto Boys. In the first place Soapy made the boast in Knight & Wilder's garage that, when the Auto Boys set out on the tour, the object of which was shrouded in such mystery, his own car might not be so far behind but that somebody would look "about like thirty cents," when somebody arrived at somebody's very secret destination. Again, the same afternoon, to a crowd of young fellows gathered for baseball practice he made such broad hints concerning the Auto Boys and a mysterious spot marked by stones piled near it, many years ago, that the dullest of them could not but connect the same with the journey Phil Way and his friends were known to have in prospect. It was the most natural thing imaginable that, being very friendly indeed with Phil, Billy, Paul and Dave, and by no means an ardent admirer of the Chosen Trio, Ed Wilder improved his earliest opportunity to tell the former of Soapy Gaines' words and half-jocular, half-threatening manner. With equal promptitude, also, a half-dozen or more of the baseball enthusiasts let it be known that, whatever the well-concealed plans and purposes of the Auto Boys might be, Gaines and Pickton, and very probably Perth, as well, had obtained information in regard to them. Thus did Soapy's exact words, in some instances, and the substance of them in others, reach the four friends at one time and another before twenty-four hours had passed.