“Beat it down, Frank—beat it down! Here I am!”
He could not be sure his words were heard above the sounds of the assault on the door, but at this moment, with a great splintering crash, the door fell. Then came shouting, and shots, and sounds of a struggle. It was over quickly, and Dick was waiting when the door of his prison room was flung wide and his brother sprang in.
“Hello, Frank!” he cried laughingly. “You’re on time. They haven’t begun chopping me up yet.”
“Where’s my pard?” shouted Buckhart, as he came tearing into the room. “Here he is!” he whooped joyously, clasping Dick in his arms. “Say, pard, you’re a dandy! But I don’t believe I’d tumbled to it that there was a cipher message in that letter if Frank hadn’t suspected such a thing.”
At this moment Cap’n Wiley appeared at the door.
“Mate Merriwell,” he said, “there’s a fine gent out here who has a shattered knee and says he’s bleeding to death. Perhaps you had better take a look at him.”
Frank turned back, followed by Dick and Brad. In the outer room both Mat and Dillon were prisoners in the hands of Merriwell’s comrades, one of them having a bullet in his shoulder. But on the floor lay another man, who had been found there with them, having arrived a short time before the appearance of the rescuers. It was Macklyn Morgan, and his knee, as Wiley had declared, was shattered by a bullet.
“I am dying, Merriwell!” said Morgan, his face ghastly pale. “You have triumphed at last. I will bother you no more.”
Frank quickly knelt and ripped open the man’s trousers leg with a keen knife. Then he called sharply for a rope, which he tied loosely about Morgan’s leg above the knee, thrusting through a loop in it a strong stick supplied him by Wiley. With this stick he twisted the rope until it cut into the flesh and stopped the profuse bleeding.
“Now, Morgan,” said Merry, “we will do our best to save your life by getting you to the nearest doctor in short order.”