"I don't know. I don't care much about taking such chances," muttered Kennell; "killing a man is bad business. I should think you and Silas would realize that, after your escape——"
"Hush! der boy hear!" warned Schultz, holding up a thin, white hand.
Kennell subsided with a growl of "what's the difference," but said no more, to Ned's intense disappointment.
It was no trick of their eyesight, then, when the two Dreadnought Boys had recognized in the two pictured convicts, at the biograph exhibition, their two dastardly shipmates. Moreover, it seemed, from what Kennell had let drop, that both men were jail-breakers. Revolving this in his mind, Ned saw the cunningness of the two men's movements, if they had actually escaped from Joliet. What less likely place to find an escaped prisoner than in the United States navy? They must have forged papers of recommendation and character, and thus tricked the careful authorities. In fact, Ned learned later that this was the case.
On and on droned the car, speeding through the same monotonous moonlit wastes of hills and scrub-grass—with here and there the gaunt form of a tall royal palm—as it had encountered on leaving the scattered outskirts of the town. All the time Ned had been working feverishly, but quietly, at his bonds, and now he began to feel what at first he scarcely dared believe—the ropes were becoming slightly loosened. In ten minutes more he had stretched the new rope, of which the thongs were made, till he could slip them off by dint of rubbing them against the cushion at his back.
His mind was made up as to what he would do the instant he found himself at liberty to make his escape. He would drop from the car and trust to luck to get away. The surface of the hills was rough and creased with numerous deep gullies. If he could get into one of these, it would be impossible for the auto to follow, and on foot—well, Ned had a few records for sprinting behind him, and he was confident he could outdistance any one of the occupants of the car.
He looked about him. The car was at this moment passing quite near to one of the arroyos—as they are called in our West—that Ned had noted. Kennell, his eyes half-closed, was hunched in a doze, the pistol in his lap. Carl Schultz and Hank Harkins were talking in low tones. Not a single one of them was watching the Dreadnought Boy.
The moment to carry out his plan, if he was to put it into execution at all, had arrived.
With a quick move, Ned slipped off his thongs, and sprang to his feet.