come upon the girls each moment, but there was no sign of them.

"They surely have discovered by this time that we are not behind them
and must be waiting for us," said Nyoda. "I can't understand it."

"Gladys is probably trying to see if we can trail her through the city
to the motor road," said Sahwah. "You know how much we talked about
being self-reliant? We'll probably find her where the road branches out
from the city, waiting with a stop watch to see how long it took us to
find her."

"We'll get there," said Nyoda grimly, her sporting blood up.

Everywhere along the road people told us about the brown car that had
gone just ahead of us and pointed out the direction it had taken. Every
time we turned a corner we expected to hear the laughter of the girls
who were leading us such a merry chase, but we didn't. Soon we were out
of the city and on the country road once more, and we were quite a bit
puzzled not to find them waiting for us. We certainly thought the joke
was to have ended here. But a man walking along the road had seen the
car go by half an hour before.

"Half an hour!" we echoed. "Gladys must have been speeding to have
gotten so far ahead of us." Of course, the Striped Beetle is a six-
cylinder car and more powerful than the Glow-worm, which is a four, and
then they hadn't stopped at every corner to ask the way, so it wasn't
so strange after all that Gladys was so far ahead.

"We'll make some speed on this road," said Nyoda resolutely, "and if we
don't catch Lady Gladys before she gets to Ft. Wayne, I'll know the