"Robert, Robert, are you hurt?" asked Mrs. Saunders, in dire distress, of her struggling spouse, who was making heroic efforts to wade through the waist-deep snow to the terra firma of the trodden path.
"Karl—quick!" urged the breathless Englishman, at length making his voice heard now that the struggle was terminated.
They looked where Karl had been—and there was no one. The man in the woollen helmet, too, had disappeared, and the short individual in the private's uniform was likewise nowhere to be seen.
"A bob-sleigh,"—explained Saunders, still short of breath, regaining with assistance the coveted foothold of the path,—"they pushed him on to a bob-sleigh which was anchored to the bough of a fir-tree. The little soldier man took the helm, and the other sat guarding the King with a revolver in one hand and the brake-lever in the other."
"After them!" cried old Bilderbaum excitedly, letting go his wife's hand so that she relapsed again into the treacherous quagmire of mocking powder. "After them!"
"After them!" repeated Meyer scornfully, rubbing his bruised throat. "We might do an heroic eight miles an hour down this slippery path. They will be going forty, at least. We might as well chase the moonbeams!"
"What are we to do?" asked Saunders desperately.
"That is a question that fools always ask themselves when their folly finds them out," returned Meyer bitterly. "Unfortunately there is no answer to it."