"Throw up your hands!" Tish called. And he did it. He turned a sort of blue color, too, when he saw us, and all the men with their hands up. But he looked relieved when he saw the girl.
"Thank Heaven!" he said. "The way I've been riding this country—"
"You rode hard enough away from the pass," she replied coldly.
We took a revolver away from him and lined him up with the others. All the time he was paying little attention to us and none at all to the other men. But he was pleading with the girl.
"Honestly," he said, "I thought I could do better for everybody by doing what I did. How did I know," he pleaded, "that you were going to do such a crazy thing as this?"
But she only stared at him as if she hated the very ground he stood on.
"It's a pity," Tish observed, "that you haven't got your camera along. This would make a very nice picture. But I dare say you could hardly turn the crank with your hands in the air."
We searched him carefully, but he had only a gold watch and some money. On the chance, however, that the watch was Mr. Ostermaier's, although unlikely, we took it.
I must say he was very disagreeable, referring to us as highwaymen and using uncomplimentary language. But, as Tish observed, we might as well be thorough while we were about it.
For the nonce we had forgotten the other man. But now I noticed that the pseudo-bandits wore a watchful and not unhopeful air. And suddenly one of them whistled—a thin, shrill note that had, as Tish later remarked, great penetrative power without being noisy.