With the little light shed by the lantern over the scene, they saw that two men were holding a third one, each carried a suitcase, and the man with the lantern also carried a traveling case. The loot was ready to be gotten away with!
“Look here, Marmette,” one of the men spoke in low but harsh tones, deadly anger buried in his words. “We’re going to play fair. You’re to get a hundred dollars. That’s what you get, and we’ll pay you. But you’ve got to tell us where that box is.”
“I told you I don’t know anything about no box,” sullenly replied the man in the center.
One of the men put down his suitcase as they came to a halt on the river bank. The man with the lantern also set down his bag.
The fellow who had set down his suitcase first now reached back of the center man and brought a rope more tightly around him. The watching party saw that Jed Marmette was bound tightly with a heavy rope, his only freedom being his legs.
“You know that the chest was not in that place when we put it there. Some one uncovered it. You were the only one who knew where it was, and you uncovered it. You’ve been into it. You got that little box out of there, and we want to know where it is.” The second man spoke tensely, hoarsely, a severe threat in every tone of his low-voiced words.
Again the prisoner said he knew nothing of the box.
“All right then, bo, we’ll see what we can do about it,” and he, too, set his suitcase on the ground.
With this he helped the first man tighten the rope around Jed Marmette, pinioning his arms securely to his sides, fixing him so that he could offer no resistance.
The party of trailers stood in the shadow of the bushes, looking on at this drama between thieves, catching every word that was said, seeing every move that was made.