Cullen shook his head, and a thought which brought a smile to his freckled face crept into Tommy's mischievous cranium.
"I'll tell you what I think," he said. "We were in this gulch last night, and saw the train robbers. They were on the summit, not far from the Wagner flat, as we ought to call it. If anybody has been living in that cave this morning, it's the train robbers. Say," he went on, with the idea of giving the detectives a good scare, "those train robbers are the fiercest fellows I ever saw. We saw 'em hold up six armed cowboys last night!"
The two detectives looked at each other apprehensively.
"If they should see you standing here," Tommy went on, "and were wise to the fact that you are Chicago detectives, they'd pump in the lead until your heads looked like a pound of Swiss cheese."
"You seem to know quite a lot about those train robbers, lad!"
"He knows too much," Cullen declared. "We'll just take him along with us and hold him for a few hours!"
"If you do, you'll get in trouble!" declared Tommy.
"No threats, now!" cried Katz.
"I'm not making any threats," declared Tommy who really was rather anxious to have the detectives take him away to their camp. "I think you're a couple of cheap skates, anyway, and I don't believe you're Chicago detectives. I live in Chicago myself, and I never saw bums like you on the force of plain clothes men."
The taunting words did exactly what Tommy had expected them to do. Katz seized him viciously by the arm and started away down the valley. The boy was perfectly willing to accompany the detective, for he believed that by doing so he might find out what steps they were taking for the capture of the escaped convict, but he pretended to feel great indignation as he was hurried along over the rough ground.