One of the men answered him.
“Grab a torch and jump out there as lively as you can.”
“Yes, sir,” said Browning; and seizing a torch from a socket in the wall, he made a desperate leap past the Steam Man into the darkness.
He didn’t care to go, not a bit of it, but then Captain Jerry Prime had a peculiar style about giving orders.
He gave out his command, and then fixed his eyes upon the man he had given the order to; one hand rested upon the butt of a revolver in his belt, and the poor chap knew that it meant obedience or death, every time.
The first thing Browning met when he reached the open air was a hand—a human hand.
This hand was formed with the usual amount of fingers and the adjunctive thumb, and they were all doubled up into a compact ball.
Browning must have met this with his face, somewhere about the region of the center of his face.
It would have appeared to an outsider that he was puzzled.
He evidently thought that it was some sort of a problem, for he lay down on the ground at full length to solve it.