Hatch was the first man out, but the big German was so close a second that he knocked his smaller partner down and fell over him. Clanahan kept his feet. He had a gun in his hand that looked to me, in the darkness, as big as a cannon. I was flattened against the side of the scale shack, and when the dive-keeper tried to side-step around the two fallen men who were blocking the way, I snatched the folded paper from his pocket; snatched it and ran as if the dickens was after me.
That was a bad move—the runaway. If I had kept still there might have been a chance for me to make a sneak. But when I ran, and fell over a pile of loose coal, and got up and ran again, they were all three after me, Clanahan taking blind shots in the dark with his cannon as he came.
Naturally, I made straight for the wagon gate, and forgot, until I was right there, that it, and the wicket through one of the leaves, were both locked. As I shook the wicket, a bullet from Clanahan's gun spatted into the woodwork and stuck a splinter into my hand, and I turned and sprinted again, this time for the gates where the coal cars were pushed in from the railroad yard. These, too, were shut and locked, and when I ducked under the nearest gondola I realized that I was trapped. Before I could climb the high fence anywhere, they'd get me.
They came up, all three of them, puffing and blowing, while I was hiding under the gondola.
"It's probably that cow-boy spotter of Norcross's, but he can't get away," Hatch was gritting—meaning Tarbell, probably. "The gates are locked and we can plug him if he tries to climb the fence. There's a gun in the scale-house. You two look under these cars while I go and get it!"
It was up to me to move again. Henckel was striking matches and holding them so that Clanahan could look under the cars, and I could feel, in anticipation, the shock of a bullet from the big gun in the dive-keeper's fat fist as I crawled cautiously out on the far side. Creeping along behind the string of coal cars I came presently to the great gantry crane used for unloading the fuel. It was a huge traveling machine, straddling the tracks and a good part of the yard, and the clam-shell grab-bucket was down, resting on its two lips on the ground.
At first I thought of climbing to the frame-work of the crane and trying to hide on the big bridge beam. Then I saw that the two halves of the clam-shell bucket were slightly open, just wide enough to let me squeeze in. If they were looking for a full-sized man—Tarbell, for instance, who was as husky as a farm-hand—they'd never think of that crack in the bucket; and in another second I had wriggled through the V-shaped opening and was sitting humped up in one of the halves of the clam-shell.
That was a mighty good guess. When Hatch came back with his gun, they combed that coal yard with a fine-tooth comb, using a lantern that Hatch had gotten from somewhere and missing no hole or corner where a man might hide, save and excepting only the one I had preempted.
As it happened, the search wound up finally under the crane, with the three standing so near that I could have reached out of the crack between the bucket halves and touched them.
"Der tuyfel has gone mit himself ofer der fence, yes?" puffed Henckel. And then: "Vot for iss he shoot off dem pistols, ennahow?"