"Well," the youth stood up straight, hands in pockets, whistling softly, "the 'Green Bottle' is herself again, cleaned, curried and coddled. Got that letter? I'll go in and change my duds, and then I guess we're ready. What? You got Terry's letter all right?" Minga produced the letter; with one eye on the distant house, the two rereading it together, enjoying the sense of secrecy, half giggling at the queer spelling and altogether excited over their plan. The black round script ran thus: "_The gang stops work at five. The guards goes first to git the truck ready to take us bak to the pen! If you come threw about that time, I will beat it to your car and take the chance. Go slow till I jump; if I catch on, go like hell; go like hell anyways. There is a curve ahead to the right, but that is what you want, as the guards got motorcycles. So no more at present. Give the duck that brings this fifty cents and oblige_ "YOU KNOW WHO." As Minga read, the two young faces suffused with a thrilled fire; weeks ago at the trial Minga and Dunce had decided to abduct Terry. The legal aspects of the thing hardly occurred to them. This sort of thing was done in the movies successfully, why not in actual life? Their plan was to snatch the boy from the road-building gang sent out by the state's prison to the stone crusher on the Western Shore where road-making was in progress. Terry was then to be conveyed in their automobile to the deserted Stone Oven of Revolutionary fame near Bear Mountain. Here, where a little stream wandered through the bracken, he could be driven to every day and supplied with food until it should be safe to convey him to a night train and ship him to the West. Minga and Dunce had worked out the thing with dime novel detail, with dramatic appreciation of its flavor and dash, until the project ceased to have its original motive of saving Terry and gradually became their own twentieth century private automobile adventure. They had a charmed sense of thrill and a pleasant feeling of outwitting such staid and sober folk as Watts Shipman. It was not at all uncharacteristic of young persons, not at all uncharacteristic of the time, not at all uncharacteristic of the laughable enigma of human nature that at the very moment that the two were starting out to do something entirely discreditable, inevitably wrong, that they should be resolving with all the power and imagination of their young souls to adjust themselves better to the world they lived in. If it occurred to Minga and Dunce that as a first step in their new resolutions the Terry abduction was hardly judicious, they put the idea aside; each felt committed to the thing; neither knew how to withdraw.