The elder Pulsifer's fat face quivered, while his brother's already red visage deepened in color to an angry crimson.
"No; not insane, gentlemen," quietly replied the inventor. "It is you who must be that for imagining for a moment that I would set a price for selling out Uncle Sam."
"Hurray!" breathed Ned from behind his bush; "it's the Pulsifers I'm aching, twitching, dying to get a slam at now."
"So, then, you have been trying to draw us out!" shouted the elder Pulsifer, beside himself with fury at the unexpected turn of affairs. "You have led us on, you cur, you sneak, you hound, you——"
Smack!
The inventor's palm shot out and struck Pulsifer's fat face a stinging blow. In the moonlight Ned could see a dark, angry patch appear where it had struck.
The younger Pulsifer made a leap for the inventor as the blow resounded. The Dreadnought Boy saw something glitter in his hand as he leaped forward.
It was a revolver that the would-be briber had drawn.
At the same instant, and just as Ned was about to spring forward, the elder man drew from his coat-tail pocket a silver whistle. He placed it to his lips and blew a shrill blast.
Simultaneously four dark forms leaped from behind a sort of summer-house shrouded in creepers, and flung themselves on the inventor.