“Oh, the man in the cellar. I forgot him. You must go to his help, Rob, with a rope.”
In a few hurried words she explained the startling tableau being enacted below them, when Rob and the men with him started to see what could be done, while the women stood all together in a group, half in tears and half in fright over the strange situation.
No change had taken place in the cellar, for the unknown man held his victims so at bay not one dared to move. The lantern had dropped from the hand of the man called Bill, but it had not been extinguished.
“They are a string of precious scamps on whose heads there is a good price set. Tie them fast and firm.”
Willing hands did this, and though the baffled outlaws raved and cursed, begged and implored, they were soon prisoners.
“We came in the nick of time,” said Dr. Menter, “and though I do not fully understand what this move means, I feel certain it is going to work in your favor, Robert. Ha! what means this skeleton here in the ground? I believe we are about to get at the mystery of the old red house.”
“You are,” said the stranger, who had put aside his revolvers, and having brushed the dirt from his clothes, appeared before the rest a fine specimen of manhood. “I think I can give you the key. But let us go above, as I have matters of closer interest to me that I want to speak of first.
“Rob, though you have grown so I should not have recognized you if your name had not been spoken, I am Gideon Bayne, your father!”
CHAPTER XXX.
THE TRIUMPH OF RIGHT.
It was not until he had been folded in the arms of his new-found father that Little Hickory could realize the truth of what had been spoken.