When the policeman awakened from his temporary trance, he was very much awake.
“There is still a live chance to nab him,” he exclaimed, “if we can only get down there before the collier clears. Once out in the channel and that fool is liable to drown himself.”
If the officer had only known it, the man he most wanted, and upon whose head was the far greater price, even now was a stowaway in the very ship into which Hamar had been tumbled.
CHAPTER XIII.
FOILED BY A FALL.
Such was the haste of the officer to get to ground that he started down the spike row in the chimney regardless of the fact that a slip for him might spell dire consequence. It was not exactly a slip, however, that actually brought him to grief, but the outpulling of one of the big nails, owing to the drag of unusual weight, and resulting in about a twenty-foot fall. Had it not been for the assumed leadership of the ponderous policeman, either or both of the boys who might have immediately preceded him would either or both probably have ceased to take any further interest in the doings of earth.
Billy, next in the line of descent, almost took a drop himself, when he heard the gasp of alarm and the thud of the heavyweight on the stone pavement below.
The fallen man was unconscious when the boys reached his side, and blood was flowing in thin streams from his nostrils. He groaned when an attempt was made by Henri to raise his head for pillowing on the boy’s coat, which he had removed for the purpose.
“One of us had better go for help right away,” suggested Billy, “and I guess it will be me, for you are better on the nursing part of the job.”
With the utterance the self-elected seeker for aid ran at a lively clip up the passage toward the street front.
The runner was hardly through the spring-locked door before Henri, left behind as nurse, noted in his patient signs of returning consciousness. Indeed, the policeman had opened his eyes and was staring at his attendant.