"Wait for me, you long ijiot! If you turn up alone they'll knife you before you can say 'Jack Robinson.'"
Dick had no intention of saying "Jack Robinson," but he moderated his pace, and helped Tagg over the ground by grasping his arm. They soon saw that two men had pulled the driver off the box, and were holding him down—indeed, tying him hand and foot. Royson prevented the success of this operation by a running kick and an upper cut which placed two Marseillais out of action. Then he essayed to plunge into a fearsome struggle that was going on inside the carriage. Frantic oaths in German and Italian lent peculiar significance to a flourishing of naked knives. But that which stirred the blood in his veins was his recognition of Baron von Kerber's high-pitched voice, alternately cursing and pleading for life to assailants who evidently meant to show scant mercy. One man who, out of the tail of his eye, had witnessed Dick's discomfiture of the coachman's captors, drew a revolver, a weapon not meant for show, as its six loaded chambers proved when Dick picked it up subsequently.
Royson had no love of unnecessary risk. Stooping quickly, he grasped the hub of the off front wheel, and, just varying the trick which saved Miss Fenshawe in Buckingham Palace Road, threw the small vehicle over on its side. No doubt the patient animal in the shafts wondered what was happening, but the five struggling men in the interior were even more surprised when they were pitched violently into the road.
Royson sprang into the midst of them, found von Kerber, and said:
"You're all right now, Baron. We can whip the heads off these rascals."
The sound of his English tongue seemed to take all the fight out of the remaining warriors. Tagg had closed valiantly with one, and the others made off. Von Kerber rose to his feet, so Royson went to Tagg's assistance. He heard the Baron shriek, in a falsetto of rage:
"You may have recovered the papyrus, Alfieri, but it is of no value to you. Name of an Italian dog! I have outwitted you even now!"
While kneeling to pinion the footpad's arms behind his back, thus rescuing Tagg from a professor of the savate, Dick tried to guess von Kerber's motive in hurling such an extraordinary taunt after one of his runaway adversaries, and in French, too, whereas the other had an Italian name, and, in all likelihood, spoke only Italian. Was this Alfieri the man who "hated" von Kerber—who "brought a very serious charge" against him? But Royson was given no time for consecutive thought. The Baron, breathing heavily, and seemingly in pain, came to him and said, in the low tone of one who does not wish to be overheard:
"Let your prisoner go, Mr. King. I am all right, and everlastingly obliged to you, but I do not wish to be detained in Marseilles while the slow French law gets to work. So let him go. He is nothing—a mere hireling, yes? And we sail to-morrow."