This led Billy to tell all about the misfortune that had followed the picking up of the strange automobile. The farmer ruefully shook his head. There were many days together that no vehicle went along this road, in these latter years, he said. He could hardly understand how so strange a thing should happen almost at his door. And he had been disturbed in other ways. Only last night, as he sat in the kitchen door, he had seen a crouching figure in the moonlight slip from one tree to another. It was after midnight. Visitors he little expected to have at any time, much less at such an hour. So he called out, "Hello, there!" The figure hastened away and he saw it no more. "It fretted me some," said the old gentleman slowly, "but I didn't see anything more, clean to daylight." Somehow the picture of the aged, unhappy man sitting all night in the kitchen door, as his imagination presented it, touched Billy's sympathies deeply. He asked if Mr. Peek would not like to take a little ride in the car to Ferndale. They were coming back at once. It would take but a little while, he urged. With something more like a smile than had been seen on his face for many a year, the old man said he never had ridden in an automobile, and would be glad to go. He climbed up to the front seat beside Paul. Billy told him it was the more comfortable place to ride. And plainly Mr. Peek enjoyed the trip. He was quite silent but his deep, pain-marked eyes lighted up noticeably. "It's a grand thing to be young," said he, at last. Neither blacksmith nor storekeeper at Ferndale had heard the slightest inquiry for the runaway automobile, which was not a runaway at all at the time it passed through that village the previous Friday. Nor had they heard anything which might cast light upon the theft of the Big Six. "You'll find that whoever had this Torpedo car is the same party that hooked your machine," said the blacksmith. "Stands to reason. Wherever could he have disappeared to, if it ain't so?" "I'm afraid you're on the wrong track," smiled Billy, a little sadly. "Chief Fobes, at Griffin, says positively that the two things--this lost machine on the one hand, and the stealing of our car on the other--have no connection with each other." "Matter of opinion!" spoke the blacksmith warmly. And then as if he scarcely endorsed Willie Creek's high opinion of Mr. Fobes' ability, he added: "And I'll put my judgment against his'n any day."