At Holbrook Square they found a soldier who had seen just such a green touring car ten minutes before on the way to Abington. They swung east on the Abington road, Gallivan gun in hand, Tenney clanging his bell as he held the accelerator to the floor. The flat wooden town came on them with a rush, but beyond, in the network of roads between Whitman and Cox’s Corner, they lost the trail. Back and forth through the barren landscape they circled, along dirt ways that looped back on themselves or ended in the litter of some squatter’s chicken yard. The dust rose behind them and the afternoon shadows lengthened as the red runabout pushed on—until after almost two hours of driving they gave up. Gallivan’s revolver was back in its holster and the fire chief’s bell silent when they again reached the Plain Street crossing. Buckley waved for them to stop. “I forgot to tell you about a car that came down here and went up that way,” he told them, pointing north. “It went out of my mind. The brakes screeched so much I thought it was going into the river.” “Well,” said Gallivan, “it’s too late now.” * * * * * Instead of continuing over the tracks at Plain Street the car—with the screech that Buckley noted—had made a hairpin turn and headed back toward South Braintree on the almost parallel Franklin Street. But at the hill corner by the white-spired South Congregational Church it had swung west on Pond Street, following the curve of Sunset Lake on the right, and past the cemetery and the Torrey Elementary School on the left. After following Pond Street west for a mile, slapping and jolting, side curtains billowing and the motor roaring, the car turned south on Granite Street toward Randolph. Mrs. Alta Baker saw it near the Randolph line, moving at fifty miles an hour. At twelve minutes after three it passed Walter Desmond, a tobacco salesman, on his way from Randolph to South Braintree. Then at the junction with the Randolph highway it swung right along the broken surface of Oak Street, cut through the scrubby outskirts of the Randolph Woods for a mile and a half, and took the left fork near an old cemetery into Orchard Street. On this obscure lane it passed Albert Farmer and his wife Adeline with their horse and wagon that they had just taken from the barn where the two roads joined. The Farmers noticed the swirl of dust as the car moved toward them and they watched it make the abrupt turn south into Orchard Street.