The Clue in the Old Stagecoach Read Online Free PDF Page A

third started as a real battle. Then Ross and Audrey began to tighten up. This proved to be their undoing. Bess and George won the set by a score of six to two!
    The hand clapping was loud. The special friends whom the girls had made at Camp Merriweather rushed up to hug or congratulate the winners. Ross and Audrey Monteiths’ faces were flushed and angry. They shook hands listlessly with the winners. Finding they were receiving no attention, the two finally left the court.
    As Nancy, Bess, and George walked back together toward the lodge, Nancy said, “I’m terribly thrilled about the outcome and I wouldn’t want you to miss the rest of the tournament for anything. But this may mean that you won’t be able to help me solve the mystery.”
    George looked at her chum accusingly. “Why, Nancy Drew, do you think we’d walk out on you? The athletic director who is running this tournament will certainly understand and let us play when you don’t need us. If he won’t—why, we’ll default if necessary!”
    Nancy was thrilled by her friends’ loyalty and said she hoped the schedules could be arranged so the girls could go on to win the tournament.
    “You asked us to be with you tomorrow morning,” George said. “And I want to be there myself when that old stagecoach is taken apart. You girls go ahead upstairs. I’m going to try to set up things. See you in a few minutes.”
    When she arrived upstairs, George told them, “Everything’s fine with the committee. Bess and I will play again tomorrow afternoon.”
    The three girls started off early the next morning in Nancy’s convertible. Instead of going directly to Mrs. Pauling’s home, Nancy decided to take a narrow lane leading to the road on which John O’Brien probably would be towing the old stagecoach, and join him. Reaching it, they waited a little while for the trucker to come along. When he did not arrive, Bess suggested that probably he had been ahead of them.
    “No doubt you’re right,” said Nancy. “We’d better go on.”
    When they reached the estate, they found Mrs. Pauling standing in front of the house. Nancy introduced her friends, then asked if the stagecoach had arrived.
    “Not yet,” Mrs. Pauling answered. “And I can’t understand it. John O’Brien is usually very prompt. He’s already an hour late.”
    She took her callers out to the garden patio and they sat down on the porch to chat. Half an hour went by and still the trucker did not come.
    Mrs. Pauling, nervous about the delay, called the office of the Bridgeford restoration project and learned that John O’Brien had left the place hours before with the old stagecoach.
    “Something has happened!” Bess said nervously when she heard the report.
    Just then the telephone rang and Mrs. Pauling answered it. The girls could plainly hear a man’s deep voice at the other end of the wire.
    “Mrs. Pauling, this is John O’Brien. I—I have bad news for you. The old stagecoach has been hijacked!”

CHAPTER V
    Three Sleuths
    “HIJACKED!” Nancy murmured in disbelief.
    Mrs. Pauling held the telephone receiver partly away from her ear, so that Nancy and her friends could hear the rest of what John O’Brien was reporting.
    “I was towing the old stagecoach along a deserted road,” he said, “when two masked men jumped out from among some trees and boarded the truck. They shut off the motor and dragged me to the ground. They bound and gagged me, and left me in the woods. Then the two of them unfastened the tow chain and went off with the stagecoach.”
    “How terrible!” Bess said.
    “After they’d gone around a bend,” the trucker went on, “I heard a motor start up, so I guess the men went off in either a car or a truck and took the old stagecoach with them.
    “After a while I managed to get free and drove along the road looking for them, but they were gone. I stopped at the first farmhouse I came to—it’s called Brookside. That’s where I am now. Mrs. Pauling, I’m