With a little choking cry, Channing Lockyer pitched forward, but, as he did so, the pistol exploded, its report echoing hollowly against the dreary walls of the abandoned hotel.
“Confound it! Suppose some one heard that?” growled the man, whom Channing Lockyer knew as Armstrong.
“No danger of that, Watson Camberly, my boy,” chuckled Ferriss, gazing at the senseless form stretched at his feet. “Here, Anderson and you, Gradbarr, bear a hand here and get this fellow aboard the Viper.”
“Well, Ferriss,” said Watson Camberly triumphantly, as the former foreman of the Lockyer yard helped lift the unconscious inventor, “well, Ferriss, did I do a good day’s work? It looks to me as if Atlas stock will take a jump shortly.”
CHAPTER XVI.
INTO THE THICK OF IT.
While Ned and Herc were casting desperately but ineffectively about for some means of frustrating what they now believed was a deliberate plot to get the inventor into some kind of a trap, old Tom came on deck.
“Ahoy, shipmates,” he began; “you’ve shipped funeral faces. What’s in the wind?”