In a moment a light flashed from a big lumber-pile fifty feet away and several feet higher than the pile he was on. A watchman was whipping about him with a dark lantern, searching the top of the lumber.
Hitch Diamond dropped over the side and hit the sawdust trail again. He ran down a little by-path, skinning his elbows upon the projecting planks and stubbing his bare toes against all kinds of obstacles, until he fell over something and tumbled onto something with a clatter like the roll of a snare-drum.
A man loomed up before him not twenty feet away and said “Ho!” in a frightened voice.
Hitch got up and went away from that place with astonishing speed.
Then the watchman on the lumber-pile threw the rays of his dark lantern down into the runway just as Hitch passed, and the terrified negro ran full into the glare.
Three pistol-shots splintered the wood around him as he ran on; the watchman’s sharp voice called to the man-hunters, and in a second, hundreds of men had turned and were converging toward the spot where Hitch Diamond was running around a lumber-pile like a trapped rabbit.
“Guard the runways, men!” the watchman’s voice ordered sharply. “I’ll flash the light into the alleys for you!”
The watchman began to leap from pile to pile, throwing the rays of his dark lantern down into each corridor, and coming constantly closer to where Hitch Diamond was hiding.
“My Gawd!” Hitch chattered as he looked up at the fantastic, mountainous pile beside which he was crouched.
Salvation came with the thought that the pile he stood beside was higher than the one on which the watchman stood. He began to climb, hand over hand, praying that the light would not reach him before he could attain the summit.