Radio Boys in the Flying Service; or, Held For Ransom by Mexican Bandits

by J. W. Duffield

The Mexican who was riding next to him noticed the motion and laughed hoarsely.

“Aha, young feller,” he cried in his broken English. “You have decide to come back to this cold world, eh? I theenk you will find it one verry cold world—yess.” Again he laughed and the laughter was taken up by the others, sneering, mocking, making the blood run cold in Phil’s veins.

The next moment he was on fire with rage. Cowards—to taunt a fellow when they knew he was helpless to strike back. Just let them loose those cruel bonds from his hand and feet and he’d show ’em.

But in his heart he knew there would be no loosening of those bonds and he had to grit his teeth to bear the pain of them. The Mexicans continued to laugh and jeer at him and he tried his best to close his ears to their taunts. If only he could manage to keep quiet! If only he could make them think that he did not hear!

He knew the hopelessness, under the circumstances, of answering them. It would only be giving them the chance they were looking for, to hurl further insult upon him.

Those bonds, those bonds—if only he might have them loosened for half a moment, just long enough to allow the blood to flow into his numbed fingers. A groan found its way to his tightly pressed lips, but he managed, somehow, to stifle it. He would not make an outcry. He would die before he would let them know how he was suffering! Doggedly, he set his teeth still harder.

He tried to think back to that moment when he had been struck. He remembered thinking in that second of time before the uplifted cudgel had crashed down on his head that he had been discovered by some of Murray’s gang. That was the natural supposition. Having caught him in the act of eavesdropping and fearing that he knew too much of their plans, the thieves would want nothing so much as to put him out of the way.

But it had not been one of Murray’s gang who had struck that murderous blow. That was moderately certain since he was now riding over the desert, a captive of Mexican bandits. It had almost surely been a Mexican who had attacked him.

Then, like a flash, came the recollection, of his strange certainty that someone had been dogging his steps back there in the woods. He had thought it only his imagination, when, in reality it had been fact.

Followed as a cat follows a mouse, silently, relentlessly, awaiting the right moment to spring. At the thought, a creepy sensation traveled up and down his spine. It was horrible to think of himself being followed like that.