Part 44 (1/2)
”Yes, several of them; one in each state-room.”
”Good! that means batteries of some sort,” said Ford. ”Rummage for them, Brissac, while I get that wire in here.”
The wire was successfully pulled in through the front vestibule without giving the alarm. Ford twisted it in two when he had enough of it to reach the central compartment. Adair did sentry duty while the two technicians wrought swiftly. The bell battery was found, the ground connection made with a bit of copper wire stripped from one of the state-rooms, and Ford quickly adjusted the delicate spring of the tiny field relay.
What he feared most was that the few dry-cells of the bell battery would not supply the current for the eight miles of line up Horse Creek. For a time, which lengthened to dragging minutes, the anxious experimenters hung over the tiny field instrument. The sensitive magnet seemed wholly dead. Then, suddenly, it began to tick hesitantly in response to Ford's tapping of the key.
”Thank G.o.d, the battery is strong enough,” he exclaimed. ”Now, if there is somebody within hearing at Frisbie's end of the line ...”
He was clicking persistently and patiently, ”E-T,” ”E-T,” ”E-T,”
alternating now and then with the Horse Creek call and his own private code letter, when Adair came up from his post at one of the rear windows. The golden youth was the bearer of tidings, but Ford held up his hand for silence: some one was breaking in to reply from Frisbie's--Frisbie, himself, as the minimized tickings speedily announced.
Ford snipped out his call for help in the fewest possible words:
Arm M'Grath's gang and bring it by train to Horse Creek, quick.
MacMorroghs are trying to dynamite us in the Nadia. FORD.
Almost without a break in the insect-like tickings the reply came:
Stand them off; help coming.
The thing done, the master workman in Ford s.n.a.t.c.hed at the helm.
Did you catch and hold the pick-and-shovel men from this camp?
he clicked anxiously.
Got them all herded here and ready to go back to work--for more pay,
answered Frisbie; and Ford ticked one more word, ”Hurry,” and closed the key with a sigh of relief. Then, and not until then, Adair said: ”Is that all, for the present? If it is, I'm sorry to have to report that the beggars outside have hit upon your gas-pipe scheme. They are rolling a round, black thing with a string attached down upon us from the commissary. The slant of the hill is just enough to keep it coming where the ground is smooth.”
From sheer force of habit, Ford disconnected his field telegraph, cased and pocketed it. Then there was an instant adjournment to the rear windows on the camp side. Happily, the rolling bomb was as yet only on the way. Pebbles and roughnesses intervened here and there to stop or to turn it aside, and since it was out of reach of their longest pole, the dynamiters would start it on again by throwing stones at it.
Hereupon ensued a struggle which, under other conditions, would have figured as horse-play. One after another the three men in the car heaved cus.h.i.+ons, pillows, obstructions of any sort, in the path of the rolling menace. And behind the commissary barricade the dynamiters patiently twitched the bomb by the firmly fastened fuse this way and that to avoid the obstacles, or sent it forward under the impact of well-directed missiles.
Ford was the first of the three to recognize the futility of the cus.h.i.+on barricades.
”They'll beat us--they'll drop it in the ditch right here under us in spite of fate!” he juried. ”Brissac: go and break the gla.s.s in the accident tool-case and bring me the ax, quickly!” And when he had it; ”Now get me a piece of that telegraph wire and bend a hook on the end of it--jump for it; you'll have to twist it off with your fingers!”
With an energy that made no account of the lamed arm, Ford tore up the carpet and fell to work fiercely, cutting a hole through the car floor; while Brissac broke a piece from the wire and bent a finger-shaped hook on the end of it. Adair, with his eye at a hole in a window shade, gave his attention to the attack.
”They are getting it here, slowly but surely,” he reported. ”It is going to roll under us just about where you are.... Now it has gone past my line of sight.” And a moment later, in the same drawling monotone: ”They have lighted the fuse, but there is a good long string of it to burn through. Take your time--” then, with a sudden failure in the monotone: ”No, by Jove! you can't take your time! The fire is jumping across the road to beat the band!”
The hole was opened through the floor, and Ford was on his stomach with his face and an arm in the aperture, fis.h.i.+ng desperately for the loop in the fuse. It was his success, his sudden drawing of the loop up into the car, that had shocked Adair out of his pose. Brissac was ready with the ax, and the instant the loop appeared it was severed, the burning end cast off, and the other end, with the bomb attached, was safely drawn up into the car.
The perspiration was running from Ford's face in streams when he had the engine of death securely in his hands.
”Take it, Roy,” he gasped. ”Drop it into the water-cooler. That will be the safest place for it if they fall back on the gun-play.”
As if his word had evoked it, a storm of rifle bullets swept through the car, smas.h.i.+ng windows, breaking the remaining gas globes and splintering the wood-work. Again and again the flashes leaped out of the surrounding shadows and the air was sibilant with whining missiles.