“You may thank your lucky stars you’d got a watch on, and that there was just a moment of silence in which I heard it tick,” rejoined Harley Greenoak, gravely.
“Eh?”—puzzled. “That how you found me? Through the ticking of a watch?”
“That—and no other way. It’d be like hunting for a needle to look for you in this location, even if we hadn’t to fight our way out first. Well, your dad was right. You are a record for getting into hornets’ nests.”
There was no more to be done. Inspector Chambers was not going to take the responsibility of arresting Vunisa simply because this young fool had run his head, as Greenoak had said, into a hornets’ nest. So, after reading that potentate a severe lecture, he withdrew his force.
There was another who came in for a sample of the lecture, and that was Dick Selmes. If he chose to hold out his own throat to be cut, he might as well wait until he was on his own responsibility, and so on. To all of which Dick listened very penitently.
“Think they really meant cutting my throat, Inspector?” he said.
“That’s just exactly what they did intend,” interposed Harley Greenoak. “They were going to cut your throat after we had gone, and then burn the hut over you, so as to destroy all trace.”
“The mischief they were! But how do you know, Greenoak?”
“Because I overheard them saying so, as we came away,” was the tranquil reply. “They were likewise expressing disappointment at being done out of such a rare bit of fun.”
“Ugh, the brutes!” exclaimed Dick, turning in his saddle to scowl back at the dark forms gathered on the hillside, watching the retreating Police. “I’ll pay them out for it when the war begins.”