Before Ned could make another move, a hot flame fanned his face; a loud report rang in his ears, and he felt a sharp, stinging pain in his head. Then he lost consciousness.
As he fell with a crash against a chair, bringing it a splintered wreck to the floor with him, Herc deposited the fainting woman on an old-fashioned settee, and sprang with a roar of anger at Kennell. But as he did so, two other figures suddenly appeared in the open doorway of the farm-house kitchen.
"It's Bill Kennell!" cried one of them, who was no other than Merritt. He and Chance had seen Ned's descent, and had dropped, too, to see if, perchance, some bad luck had not overtaken their rivals. Hearing the uproar in the kitchen, they had hastened to it.
As Herc fairly leaped on Kennell, before the ruffian had a chance to fire another shot, Merritt took in the whole situation with the quick intuition of a man of his intellect.
Kennell, with Herc on the top of him, was tottering backward, and on the verge of falling helplessly before his powerful young antagonist, when Merritt, with a quick movement, picked up a heavy chair. Raising it, he brought it down with all his might on the unconscious Herc's head. The next instant the two Dreadnought Boys lay senseless on the floor of the kitchen, one of them seemingly badly wounded.
[CHAPTER VIII.]
HERC GETS "A TALKING TO."
When Ned came to himself, it was to find the farmer's wife bending over him and laving the wound on his head with warm water. Herc, with a quizzical look on his face, stood nearby.