The next instant, with a rasping grind and a sickening swaying and jouncing the car tore full tilt down the side of the road, which, at this point, was banked, and fetched up motionless and hub-deep in a pool of dark water.
“Don’t let the kid escape,” came a shout from the man who had boarded the car on the roadside, as the auto ceased to move.
But before the words had left his lips Roy had perceived that the water in the pond was not much more than knee high. Quick as a cat he was out of the tonneau before any of the others had time to collect their wits. As the man shouted his warning the lad struck out through the oozy ground, seeking, with every ounce of his strength, to shroud himself in the darkness at the pond edge before the pistol wielder could locate him.
But he had not gone more than a few steps when—
Bang!
A red flash cut the night behind him and a bullet whistled by his ear.
“Look out, you fool, you don’t want to kill him,” came a voice behind him.
“Gid Gibbons,” flashed through Roy’s mind. He was almost at a thick clump of alders now. As he heard the splashing of the bodies of the abductors, as they took to the water after him, he plunged into the coppice and pushed rapidly on into its intricacies.
Shouts and cries came from behind him, and suddenly a blinding shaft of white radiance cut through the blackness. They had turned on the searchlight of the car in a determined effort to locate their escaped prisoner.
As the light penetrated among the maze of alder trunks, Roy threw himself flat. While his pursuers hunted about, muttering and angrily discussing the situation, he crouched in his shelter, hardly daring to breathe. After what seemed an eternity of suspense he heard one of the men, whose voice he seemed to recognize as that of the pistol carrier, angrily declaiming.