“They’ve been held up.”
“Looks that way.”
As the two boys neared the car, the whole scene became clear to them. It was a limousine and three men, two on one side and one on the other, were poking revolvers into the windows of the enclosed part. As the boys came up, the chauffeur, who till then had been paralyzed by fear, leaped from his seat and dashed off, taking the low stone wall, surrounding the park, at one bound.
“The great coward! He might have been a big help to us, too,” exclaimed Jack with indignation as he saw this.
“Yes, it’s three to two, and they are armed,” cried Raynor.
The next moment, with a startling yell they attacked two of the men simultaneously. One of them went down with a crash under Jack’s powerful right swing before he could do anything to defend himself, for none of them had noticed the approach of the two American lads.
The fellow’s revolver went spinning over the wall and fell with a ring of metal out of his reach. In the meantime, Raynor was not having such an easy time with the man he had tackled. This fellow was a heavily-built specimen of dock lounger, or worse, with a Belgian cap on his head and a handkerchief tied over the lower part of his face.
As Raynor rushed him, he seized the young engineer in an iron grip and pressed a weapon to his side.
“Fool, to interfere! This is your last moment on earth!” he snarled.
From the interior of the limousine, two women, one elderly and the other young, looked out, paralyzed with alarm. Too frightened to scream, they sat stock still as they saw what was about to happen.