The boy pointed upward, and Black Ben thought he meant that his father was above in the hotel.
“What’s his name?” demanded the man. “I’ll go up to him at once.”
“Spare yourself the trouble, for it’s higher than you’ll ever get. He is dead.”
For a moment the man was taken aback, and then his fiery temper flamed up.
“You’re some runaway brat who thinks——”
“Stop!” exclaimed the lad. “That is the second time you have called me a brat, and I warn you not to do so again! I am not a brat, and I——”
At this point one of the men who had pulled the dog away stepped in by a side door and clutched the wrist of the boy, giving it a wrench and twisting the revolver away with his other hand.
It was done in a twinkling, and Black Elrich sprang forward. At the same moment Merriwell advanced, with his two companions at his heels.
But, before one of them could interfere, out through the same door strode a tall form that caught the man who had clutched Dick, grasped him by the neck, gave him a swing and a throw that flung him fifteen feet away, sprawling on the tiled floor of the corridor.
Behind this tall figure came another, about the shoulders of which was a dirty red blanket, perchance the most remarkable figure ever seen in the Hotel Metropole.