quickly: "We're not going to follow anybody who's expecting to be murdered any minute. We'd better go the Brownsville road. Back to that filling station and ask if the road's good."
Jo Ann obediently backed the car to the filling station, though a queer feeling now possessed her that she ought to have kept on the Laredo road. "I can't help feeling as worried over that man as if I'd known him for a long time," she told herself. "I wonder if I'll ever see him again."
By this time Miss Prudence was talking to the service-station man about the road.
"I think the road's okay, but"--he nodded toward a man in uniform--"he'll know. He's a coast guard and goes back and forth often that way. He's waiting to catch a ride to Brownsville now."
Miss Prudence inspected the tall blond young man closely, then remarked low-voiced, "It might be a good idea to have him go with us: coast guards are used to protecting people."
"I hope she asks him to ride with us," Jo Ann whispered to Florence. "He might know about the mystery man, since he's been riding in the car with him."
The next moment Miss Prudence gestured to the coast guard, who promptly hurried over to the car and in answer to her questions began praising the road and the beauty of the valley.
"Californians could learn how to boost higher and better from him," Jo Ann thought, smiling. "Miss Prudence'll be sure to go now."
She was right. Miss Prudence promptly decided to go to Brownsville and asked the coast guard to accompany them. To make room for him on the front seat, she ordered Carlitos and Florence to exchange places.
"You're the sandwich filling now," Jo Ann laughingly told Carlitos, as he slipped in beside her.
Carlitos smiled doubtfully. From the expression on her face he knew she must be joking, but he could not understand the point.
After she had explained it to him, she told the curious coast guard briefly how it was that Carlitos, though an American by birth, was just beginning to speak English. The guard, proud of his newly learned Spanish, began talking in

the first break in their conversation Jo Ann quickly recounted to the guard the strange telephone conversation she had overheard in the hotel and ended tentatively, "I believe that man I overheard was one of those men whose car you were in."
"You're probably right," the guard replied. "I'd never seen either of those men before they picked me up, but they told me they'd been chasing some smugglers who'd been bringing in dope and gold across the Mexican border. I shouldn't like to be in those men's shoes. Those smugglers belong to a desperate gang who're as cold-blooded as snakes. They'd as soon kill anyone as not."
"With as many officers as we have, it looks as if they could stop that smuggling," 

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