The factor’s right hand reached out and he grasped the counter for support. He tried to speak, but in his fear and great agitation, the words would not come. A queer rumbling in his throat, his jaw muscles twitching, his face white, he stood there helplessly staring at the three determined figures confronting him.
“Didn’t expect us back, did you?” almost snarled Dick. “Had an idea that we’d starve out there, didn’t you? Thought that your friends, Wolf Brennan and Toby McCallum, would settle our hash for good and all, didn’t you? Well, we’re back. What do you propose to do about it?”
Frazer’s face distorted queerly and he protested angrily.
“What sort of a plot are you trying to lay at my door?” he wheezed. “Brennan and McCallum—I don’t understand you. What have they to do with me? If you had trouble with them, it was not of my making.”
“Don’t try to deny that you didn’t send them. You did.”
At this juncture Sandy completely lost his temper. In a flash, he had bounded over the counter, seizing Frazer by the throat.
“You wretch!” he shouted, shaking the factor as a cat might shake a mouse. “You wretch! Don’t lie to us! You sent us out there to the island of the dinosaur for no other reason than to get rid of us. And then,” Sandy shrieked “you instructed those two miserable rats to follow us to make sure we didn’t get back.”
The factor was a powerful man and Sandy’s advantage was only temporary. Frazer flung him off, stepped back and his fist crashed into Sandy’s face sending him reeling back, where he toppled and fell over a packing case. The resounding impact of his fall was sufficiently heavy to shake the room. Dick and Toma cried out angrily and they, too, leaped over the barrier. Retreating before them, Frazer sped down along the space behind the counter, reached up in one of the shelves and whipped out a revolver, just as Dick made a lurch for him.
“Stand back!” he cried, breathing hard.
An inner door flew open. There came the sound of running footsteps. Dick turned in time to see, to his unutterable astonishment, the commanding figure of Sandy’s uncle, Mr. Walter MacClaren.