THE BOOT ON THE OTHER LEG.
In the heat of action and excitement ten minutes are as nothing.
The time seems longer, however, when one sits waiting in a motionless carriage, enveloped in the gloom of night, with grim distrust and uncertainty acting like spurs in the sides of one's impatience.
Before five minutes had fairly passed, after Nick's departure, Spotty Dalton had suffered his misgivings to the very limit of his endurance.
Chick sat mentally counting the passing seconds, then scoring each departed minute with his fingers, of which he had exhausted four and a thumb, the entire complement of one hand; and all the while his eyes were riveted with intense vigilance upon the growling ruffian on the seat above him.
Had Dalton ventured so much as a move to leave his perch, Chick would have been after him like a terrier after a rat.
At the end of five minutes, however, Dalton made a preliminary move. He hitched the reins around the whipstock, then stared for a second or two toward Venner's house, fifty yards away through the surrounding park.
Then he suddenly swung round on his seat, and growled ferociously at Chick, at the same time signifying with gestures the communication he imagined would not be verbally understood:
"See here, you swarthy-faced snake fiend, I'm bound up yonder, to see what's going on! You sit where you are, d'ye hear, and I'll be back in a jiffy, if things are all right! If they're not, —— you, I'll be back just the same—with a gun!"
As if moved by a wish to understand him, Chick arose in the body of the carriage while Dalton was thus declaring himself. He heard and understood, all right, and it necessitated his getting in his work a little earlier than was planned. For Chick would take no such chances as this that Nick's operations in the house would be interfered with.
As the last word left Dalton's lips, the arm of the detective shot out through the darkness, and closed with the grip of a vise around the ruffian's neck, throttling him to silence.
"With a gun, eh?" Chick fiercely muttered, yanking Dalton backward into the body of the carriage. "You open your lips again for so much as a whisper, and I'll close them with six inches of cold steel."
In the glare of a distant lightning flash, Dalton, though struggling furiously, caught the gleam of a polished blade at his throat, and a glimpse of the flaming eyes in the face above him.
He shrank, gasping for breath, as the truth dawned upon him; and then the voice of another sounded close beside the open carriage.
"Want any help, Chick?"
Nick's youthful assistant, to whom a wire had been sent from the house of the snake charmer, had appeared like an apparition out of the roadside gloom.
"Ah! you're here, Patsy!" muttered Chick. "Yes. Clap a gag into this cur's mouth. We'll choke off his pipes first of all."
Dalton uttered a vicious growl, then felt the point of the knife pierce the skin at his throat, and he wisely relapsed into silence.
For Patsy to fish out a gag, and bind it securely in the scoundrel's mouth, was the work of a few moments only.
Then Chick jerked Dalton up from the rear cushion and out into the road, in far less time than is taken to record it.
"Off with his coat and hat, Patsy," he hurriedly commanded. "Now the false beard, my lad. Now get into them yourself, as quickly as you can."
"I'm all in, Chick," chuckled Patsy, working like a trooper.
"Got all the traps with you?"
"Sure!"
"Clap the bracelets on him, then. Now give me a second pair, and a strip of line. That's the stuff."
"Oh, I brought the whole shooting match," laughed Patsy.
"Good for you! Now mount to the box, and leave this dog to me. I'll return in half a minute."
Patsy climbed up to the seat from which Dalton had been so speedily snatched and overcome, and Chick now ran the rascal a rod or more into the woodland on the opposite side of the road.
There he threw him to the ground beside a small oak, around the trunk of which he quickly twined Dalton's legs, and then fastened them at the ankles with a pair of irons.
"I reckon you'll stay there quietly until I want you, barring that you pull up the tree," he grimly remarked, as he turned to hasten back to the carriage, in which he quickly resumed his seat.
A moment later Venner peered from the distant window—and was satisfied with what he saw.
Five minutes later he came striding down the walk and approached the carriage. Without a word to the driver, whom he supposed to be Dalton, he opened the carriage door and laid his hand on Chick's arm, at the same time pointing toward the house.
Chick signified that he understood, and held out both hands, as if he wished to be helped to the sidewalk.
Venner promptly raised both of his—only to suddenly hear a quick, metallic snap, and feel links of cold steel confining his wrists. Their icy chill went through him like a knife, and he reeled as if stricken a blow.
"Good God!" he gasped, hoarsely. "What's this?"
Chick and Patsy were already beside him.
"This," said Chick, sternly, "is your wind-up!"
"My—"
"Stop! Not a loud word, Mr. Venner, or worse will be yours! Now tell me in whispers—where is Nick Carter?"
The sight of a revolver thrust under his nose had a potent effect upon the dismayed man, yet even while he saw that he was cornered, he seized upon the hope that Kilgore and the gang might discover and release him.
"Find him yourself, if you want him!" he hissed through his teeth, with an ugly frown. "I'm cursed if I'll inform you!"
Chick did not delay for arguments or persuasion. With Patsy's help he speedily put Venner in the same helpless condition in which he had left Dalton, stretched upon the ground, within a rod of one another.
Then he threw off his disguise, and shifted his revolvers to his side pockets.
"Now for yonder house, Patsy, and to see what the remainder of this gang are at," said he. "Come with me, and have your guns ready."
"I'm with you," cried Patsy, coolly. "Guns and all."
A dash up the gravel walk brought them to the front door, which Venner had left partly open.
There they paused and listened.
Not a sound came from within the house; but overhead the tempest now was breaking, with frequent crashing peals of thunder, and flashes of lightning that illumined all the landscape. Rain, too, now began pelting down on the veranda roof.
"We'll steal in and see what we can find," whispered Chick, drawing one of his revolvers.
"Go it, then."
He led the way, and Patsy followed. The silence in the house mystified them at first. It appeared to have been entirely deserted.
When they reached the door of the dining room, however, Chick discovered on the floor the disguise which Nick had discarded.
"I have it, Patsy," he cried, softly. "They have nailed Nick, just as he expected, and have taken him somewhere to confine him."
"Perhaps in the cellar," suggested Patsy.
"I hardly think so, yet we'll have a look."
Moving as quietly as shadows, they entered the kitchen and easily located the cellar door. It was closed and locked, with the key remaining.
"Evidently they're not down there," whispered Chick.
"Let's try the upper floors," suggested Patsy. "They may be laying for us up there, but I reckon we're good for them."
"We'll take the chance, surely. Come on."
They crept through the hall again, and then mounted the broad stairway, which led to the next floor.
There the utter silence and the semidarkness quickly convinced them that they were on the wrong track.
"The stable," muttered Chick, suddenly. "We'll try the stable."
"They certainly have vamosed this ranch," remarked Patsy.
"Plainly. Come on, then, and we'll try the stable."
Together they started downstairs.
A moment later Kilgore, Pylotte and Matt Stall came flurrying into the house by the rear door.
In the bright light of the broad hall each party discovered the other at precisely the same moment, and Kilgore instantly guessed the truth.
With a cry of rage, he whipped out his revolver and fired point-blank at the two men on the stairs.
"Down 'em, boys!" he yelled furiously. "Down 'em, or our game is done for!"
His bullet glanced from the baluster rail near Chick, and buried itself in the wall behind him.
"Drop them, Patsy!" he shouted, instantly. "Shoot to kill! It's them or us!"
"Let her go, Gallagher!" roared Patsy, pulling both guns.
Then, amid the tumult of the breaking tempest outside, there began a fusillade the thunder of which rivaled that of the night, and which, though comparatively brief, was as fast and furious as any man there had ever experienced.
Pylotte went down at the first shot from Chick, however, with a bullet in his brain.
Then shot followed shot with lightning rapidity.
Both detectives sprang down several stairs to evade the rain of lead, for both Kilgore and Stall were rapidly emptying two revolvers.
A bullet singed Patsy's ear.
Another dislodged Chick's hat.
Then Kilgore reeled with a slight wound in his left arm.
A score of shots were fired and wasted, meantime, for all hands were dodging about the hall and stairs in an utterly indescribable fashion.
It was the warmest kind of a fight for fully three minutes.
Then Chick got a line on Matt Stall from behind the baluster post, and dropped him with a ragged wound in his hip.
Stall fell with a yell of rage and pain, and Kilgore found himself alone, and against odds.
He turned like a flash, and darted out of the rear door of the house.
He knew that the game was up, his confederates done for, and his own chances of escape but small; and the situation stirred to their very depths the worst elements of this lifelong criminal.
But one thought possessed him—that of revenge, that of destroying the chief cause of his downfall—Nick Carter.
With this end in view, Kilgore tore like a madman through the blinding rain of that tempestuous night, and shaped his course back to the diamond plant.