“My bike’s all right,” announced Chet. “It’s bent a little here and there, but it’s good for a few more miles yet.”
“Same here,” said Joe Hardy, looking up. “I think we’re mighty lucky to get off so easily.”
“You mighta run me down!” roared the driver of the hay wagon, now that he had recovered from his fright. “Tearin’ and snortin’ down the road on them contraptions—”
“Why don’t you watch the road?” asked Frank. “You heard us coming. We couldn’t see you. You might have killed the three of us, driving out like that. You didn’t have anything to worry about.”
“I didn’t, eh?”
“No.”
“What if I’d been killed?”
“You could hear our bikes half a mile off—unless you are deaf,” put in Joe.
“It ain’t my business to listen for them contraptions,” growled the man on the hay wagon. “I got my work to do.”
“Well, don’t blame us,” said Frank. “And the next time you drive out of a side road like that, stop, look and listen.”
“Say, who do you think you’re givin’ orders to?” and now the man reached for his whip and acted as if he meant to get down and thrash somebody.
“None of that—if you know when you are well off,” cried Joe, his eyes blazing.
Chet stepped forward.
“If you say the word, we’ll give you all that is coming to you,” he put in.
All of the boys looked so determined that the man let his whip alone.
“Get out o’ my way! I got to be goin’,” he growled.
“Well, after this you be more careful,” said Frank.
The driver grumbled, but the boys were not disposed to remain and argue the rights and wrongs of the matter. It had been an accident, pure and simple, with a certain amount of blame on both sides, so they mounted their motorcycles and drove on.
Because of the spill, the boys realized that their chances of overtaking the car thieves were correspondingly lessened, but they decided to continue the pursuit.
“At the rate they’re going,” said Chet, hopefully, “they may have an upset themselves.”
While the Hardy boys and their chum are speeding along the Shore Road on the trail of the stolen sedan, it will not be out of place to introduce them more fully to new readers.
Frank and Joe Hardy were the sons of Fenton Hardy, a famous detective who had made a national reputation for himself while on the detective force of the New York Police Department and who had retired to set up a private practice of his own. Frank Hardy was a tall, dark lad, sixteen years old, while his brother Joe was a fair, curly-headed chap, a year younger. Both boys were students at the high school in Bayport.
When Fenton Hardy retired from the metropolitan force, owing to the great demand for his services in private investigations, he had moved with his family to Bayport, a thriving city of fifty thousand, on Barmet Bay, on the Atlantic seaboard. Here the two boys attended school and here it was that they met with the first adventures that strengthened their resolution to follow in their father’s footsteps and themselves become detectives when they grew older.
Fenton Hardy was one of the greatest American criminologists, and his sons had inherited much of his ability. From their earliest boyhood it had been their united ambition to be detectives but in this they had been discouraged by their parents, who preferred to see them inclined toward medicine or the bar. However, these professions held little attraction for the lads, and when they eventually had an opportunity to display their ability as amateur detectives they felt that they had scored a point toward realizing their ambition.
In the first volume of this series, “The Hardy Boys: The Tower Treasure,” the lads cleared up a mystery centering about a strange mansion on the outskirts of Bayport, recovering a quantity of stolen jewelry and bonds after the police and even Fenton Hardy had been forced to admit themselves baffled. Thereafter, their father had made but mild objections to the pursuit of their hobby and was, indeed, secretly proud of the ability displayed by his sons. Further mysteries were solved by the boys, the stories of which have been recounted in previous volumes of this series, the preceding book, “Hunting for Hidden Gold,” relating their adventures in the far West, where they faced a bandit gang and went after a fortune in hidden gold in the depths of an abandoned mine.
Chet Morton, who was with the Hardy boys this afternoon, was one of their high school chums, a plump, good-natured lad with a weakness for food “and lots of it,” as he frequently said. He lived on a farm about a mile outside Bayport and, like the Hardy boys, was the proud owner of a motorcycle. Frank and Joe also owned a motorboat, the Sleuth, which they had bought from the proceeds of a reward they had earned by their work in solving a mystery. Tony Prito, an Italian-American lad, and Biff Hooper, two other high school chums of the Hardy boys, also owned motorboats, in which the boys spent many happy hours on Barmet Bay and in which they had, incidentally, experienced a number of thrilling adventures.
“Often wished I owned a boat,” said Chet, as they sped along, “but now I’m just as glad I have a motorcycle instead. I’d have missed all this fun this afternoon if I hadn’t.”
“You have a queer idea of fun,” Joe remarked. “Getting dumped out on my head into a wet ditch doesn’t make me laugh very hard.”
“Better than studying algebra.” Chet’s aversion to school work was well known.
For a while they sped on without talking. There was no sign of the stolen automobile, but the boys did not entirely give up hope of catching up with it. When they had gone about three miles, however, even Frank was forced to admit that
