Читать книгу The Scarecrow Mystery (Ted Wilford #8) - Norvin Pallas - Страница 7

“WELL, WHAT DO WE DO NOW?” ASKED NELSON impatiently.

“Wait for Mr. Prentice, if we can. I don’t have to get back till two, so we can wait till eleven or so.”

“Your story was written from the standpoint of the labor union, Ted. You think that’s fair?”

“The paper will carry an interview with Mr. Abbott, too. He’s the largest of the private owners. Mr. Dobson took care of that part of it.”

“Know something?” said Nelson suddenly. “If there is a strike and trouble develops, I’m going to keep my camera handy. Maybe this is the sort of thing I’m looking for—you know, something to enter in a contest. A nice, big, juicy riot, and me the only one on the spot with a camera.”

“Well, I hope you get out of it alive.”

“Yeah,” said Nelson gloomily.

“I wonder,” said Ted meditatively, his thoughts shooting off on a tangent, “about Mr. Prentice. He’s such a fluent talker that you get the impression he must know what he’s talking about. But I wonder about his statistics. That seems to be the key to the whole situation.”

“From what I’ve heard about statistics,” Nelson put in, “both sides quote the same figures to prove that they’re right! You can prove almost anything you want to with figures.”

“Oh, I imagine statistics are all right, as long as you know what it is you’ve got. You might put all men between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine in one group, and between the ages of thirty and thirty-nine in another group. What you’ve got to remember is that a man of twenty-nine is closer in age to a man of thirty from the other group than he is to a man of twenty in his own group.”

“But he’d be just as close to a man of twenty-eight as he would to a man of thirty,” Nelson observed.

“Yes. Well, I suppose it all depends on what you’re trying to prove. If you were going to place a man, a frog, and a stone in two groups, how would you do it?”

“You’d have to put the man and the frog in the same group, wouldn’t you?”

“That’s because the fact of being alive seems the most important thing to us. But if you were calculating the load on an airplane, you might put the man and the stone in the same group, and hardly bother with the weight of the frog.”

“Maybe it’s a little stone that only weighs as much as the frog,” said Nelson with a grin, “and so where are you?”

“I guess I’m right back wondering whether I ought to sign up for statistics or calculus next term.”

“Statistics would be more useful in journalism, wouldn’t it?”

“I suppose so, but I’d hate to by-pass calculus and find out later that it’s got something I need.”

“Why don’t you ask your friend, Mr. Halliday?” Nelson suggested. “He’d have all that right at his fingertips. And he must know what he’s talking about, or he wouldn’t be running the most successful investment business in the county.”

“You know, I just might do that. He’s always been a good friend. That time years ago when our family ran into some tough sledding and he pushed through a mortgage extension for us—well, that’s the sort of thing you never forget. I guess I’ve been kind of leaning on him for advice ever since.”

Mr. Prentice came back before eleven o’clock, saving them the problem of deciding how long to wait. He seemed glad to see them.

“Give me just five minutes more, boys, and I’ll be packed and ready to go.”

Within this time limit he emerged from his bedroom carrying two suitcases. He checked through the desk, found nothing there he had forgotten, and announced himself ready to leave. Nelson took one of the suitcases, and Ted the portable typewriter. Downstairs, it was only a matter of minutes to check out at the registration desk, and they left for the hotel’s parking lot. Mr. Prentice’s car turned out to be a medium-priced model, three years old, so once again it was apparent he wasn’t putting on the dog.

Out on the main highway, Nelson let Mr. Prentice take the lead. “I don’t know how fast he wants to go,” he explained.

“Maybe he’ll go so fast you won’t be able to keep up.” Ted grinned.

“Don’t worry about that. If he stays inside the speed limit, I can keep up, and if he doesn’t, then—‘So long, pardner.’ Seems kind of silly sticking together, though. The way roads are marked, nobody gets lost nowadays.”

“But we’re having lunch together,” Ted reminded him, “and maybe I can persuade him to stop in and talk to Mr. Dobson, when we reach Forestdale.”

“You going to suggest it?”

“Not till we get to Forestdale, and I see how time’s running, and whether he has any other appointments. But even if it doesn’t turn out that way, you make it more likely that he’ll think of you in case something important turns up, when you leave the door open.”

The first part of their drive was uneventful. It was a clear, cold day, and traffic was light. Mr. Prentice drove steadily, and well within the speed limits. Shortly after noon he signaled that he wanted to stop for lunch, and they nodded agreement. He turned in at a neat little roadside place, and alighting from the car, waited for them.

“Ted, I’m asking you in advance so as not to embarrass you: is it all right for me to buy your lunch?”

“Thanks,” said Ted gratefully, “but Mr. Dobson wouldn’t like it.”

They had a pleasant lunch. Mr. Prentice proved to be an interesting talker. Without mentioning either the threatened strike or the court hearing, he entertained them with a few sidelights on a career that was strange to them.

“I don’t know whether he’s right or wrong,” Nelson remarked as they took to the road again, “but I’m sure that he believes what he says is right. He’s a sincere man.”

“But that’s not always a compliment—he could be sincere and still be stupid,” Ted pointed out.

“Maybe—but Mr. Prentice is no stupe, either.”

After passing through a little town called Echo, they found themselves on the wide, open road again. Mr. Prentice was some five hundred yards ahead of them, sweeping around a long, gentle curve. Suddenly a speeding car shot past them. The driver did not pull over to the side after passing them, but straddled the center line, apparently determined to pass Mr. Prentice’s car as well. Nelson was concentrating on negotiating the curve, and Ted’s eye was also off the other cars for a moment, so that neither actually saw what happened. All they observed was that the speeding car had gone on without pausing, and that Mr. Prentice’s car had run off the road, plunged down the hill, turned over once, and landed on its side.

Nelson drew to a stop, and without speaking, the boys jumped out and ran down the hill. The doors on the topside remained closed, and Mr. Prentice apparently had made no effort to get out. They tried the handles, but either the doors were locked from the inside, or else the crash had jammed them. Nelson shaded his eyes and stared through the windowpane.

“I can see him moving,” he announced. “The crash threw him over into the next seat, but he doesn’t seem to be pinned or anything.”

“Can he open the door?”

“I don’t know. He’s sort of threshing around as though he doesn’t quite know what he’s doing. Wait a minute. He sees me now.”

In pantomime, Nelson motioned to Mr. Prentice to open the door. Ted was also looking inside now, through the back-seat window. Making an obvious effort, Mr. Prentice managed to boost himself to a raised position and tried the door, but it refused to open. Then Nelson motioned for him to try the rear door, which he did, with the same result. Apparently he was able to follow suggestions, though he still wasn’t thinking too clearly on his own.

“What’ll we do, get help?” asked Ted.

“How long will that take? Besides, what can they do except raise the car, and from the looks of it the other side is damaged worse than this. They’ll have to end up cutting him out. No, I think the best thing to do is break in this back window.”

“It’ll be tough. This is safety glass, and it isn’t even cracked.”

“Lucky thing for him. There’s nothing much worse than flying glass. Too bad this isn’t one of those kick-out windows, though. Hunt up a couple of rocks, and I’ll try to make him understand what we’re doing.”

By the time Ted returned, Nelson had made their intention known, and Mr. Prentice, having nodded his approval, was protecting himself as well as he could from the possibility of scattering glass. They were able to knock out a section of glass sufficiently large for Nelson to reach the wind-up handle. Carefully protecting his wrist from cuts, he was able to roll the window down a little, and through the larger opening at the top he could now reach the handle again, and roll the window down all the way. He was still unable to open the door, however, even from the inside.

If he were to get out very soon, Mr. Prentice would have to crawl through that open window. Fortunately, his mind now seemed a little clearer, and he was able to maneuver his head and shoulders through the opening. Then the boys were able to grab a shoulder each and give him some help. He was soon standing beside them, still a little dazed, but able to talk.

“I guess I was pretty lucky,” he decided.

“Lucky!” Nelson exclaimed. “It looked to me as if that guy rode you right off the road on purpose.”

“What for? What would he have against me?”

“How about something to do with the union,” Ted suggested, “the strike or the court hearing?”

Mr. Prentice shook his head. “No, I can’t see it. I’m not doing anything about calling a strike. I might even be able to head off a strike where another man couldn’t. As for the court hearing, I can tell you in advance that I don’t have any deep, dark secrets that are likely to hurt anybody. I’m simply going to tell the truth, and people can believe me or not.”

“Then you think it was simply an accident?” asked Ted.

“Must have been. You meet a lot of those reckless characters on the road. I didn’t see him in my mirror, but I did see another car coming from the opposite direction. Maybe he didn’t see it in time, or thought he could make it past me. Then he had to cut in in front of me to get out of the way. And naturally he didn’t stop afterward—that kind never does. Well, accident or on purpose, the result was just about the same either way.”

“Well, where do we go from here?” asked Nelson restlessly.

Mr. Prentice stared at the car a moment. “It’ll take a garage to handle that, all right. And I suppose we have to make some sort of report to the police. Echo’s the nearest place. I imagine they’ll have some kind of county or state police official there. If not, at least they’ll have a telephone.”

“How about a doctor?” asked Ted with some concern, for Mr. Prentice still wasn’t looking too sharp.

“Oh, I guess I’ll be all right. Still, I suppose a doctor would be the proper thing, in case the question of insurance liability came up—in fact, the police would probably insist upon it.”

“Then let’s find a doctor first,” Ted suggested, “and he can tell us how to locate the police.”

“If we climb up over this way, the hill isn’t so steep, and I can bring the car around,” Nelson offered. “Then it’s back to Echo. I had a feeling that I hadn’t seen the last of that burg.”