"Ah! I thought you would change your mind. So it is under the bed.
"Look under, Dick. What is there?"
"A square box," another voice said.
"Well, haul it out."
"Come on," Bob Repton whispered to the others; "the moment we are in, shout."
He stood for a moment in the doorway. A man was standing, with his back to him, holding a pistol in his hand. Another, similarly armed, stood by the side of a young woman who, in a loose dressing gown, sat shrinking in an armchair, into which she had evidently been thrust. A third was in the act of crawling under the bed. An elderly man, in his nightshirt, was standing up. A gag had been thrust into his mouth; and he was tightly bound, by a cord round his waist, to one of the bedposts.
Bob sprang forward, whirling his hockey stick round his head, and giving a loud shout of "Down with the villains!" the others joining, at the top of their voices.
Before the man had time to turn round, Bob's stick fell, with all the boy's strength, upon his ankle; and he went down as if he had been shot, his pistol exploding as he fell. Bob raised his stick again and brought it down, with a swinging blow, on the robber's head.