attention, and I felt antagonistic toward him instantly. I had the same
feeling when I saw him behind us on the road to Napoleon. And the worst
part of it was that he had done absolutely nothing to make me feel that
way toward him. He hadn't been impertinent, in fact, he had never said
a single word to any of us! All he had done was to stare searchingly at
Nyoda through that goggle mask of his. There was nothing the matter
with his looks, goodness knows. All we could see under the big goggles
were part of a nose and a brown mustache and they looked harmless
enough. Then why did Nyoda and I both have the same feeling toward him?

We inquired carefully all the way, but nowhere did we come upon any
trace of the Striped Beetle. At several places they had seen the brown
car go by the day before and at one place it had stopped for gasoline,
but no one knew of any repairs that had been made on it. The thing
began to loom up like a puzzle. If the Striped Beetle had not been
delayed by accident why had not Gladys arrived in Ft. Wayne the night
before as per schedule.

"Possibly they did arrive all right, and didn't go to a hotel because
you weren't with them," suggested Sahwah. "Gladys may have friends
there and they may have stayed with them." That fact was so very
probable that we ceased to worry about the girls, trusting that the
whole thing would be made clear when we got to Ft. Wayne.

We were in Indiana now, running through beautiful farm country, with
occasional tiny villages. Sahwah made up a game, estimating the number
of windmills we would see in a certain time and then counting them as
we passed to see how near she came to being right. As we were keeping a
sharp lookout on each side of the road so as not to miss any, we saw a
girl running across a field toward the road just ahead of us. She was