Sam was swinging when the glitter began and he connected before the gun fired. There was a sort of squashy, smacking sound and the reddish-haired man lay down quietly in the road.
"Migawd!" said Sam blankly. "This was the fella in front of the bank! He's one of those robbers!"
He stared. There was a loud crashing in the brushwood. The accident had happened at the edge of some woodland, and Sam did not need a high I.Q. to know that the friends of the red-haired man must be on the way.
A second later, he saw them. Rosie was just getting out of the car then. She was very pale and there wasn't time to tell her to get started up if possible and away from there.
One of the two running men was carrying a canvas bag with the words BANK OF DUNNSVILLE on it.
The men came at Sam, meanwhile expressing opinions of the state of things, of Sam, of the Cosmos—of everything but the weather—in terms even more reprehensible than the first man had used.
They saw the reddish-haired man lying on the ground. One of them—he'd come out into the road behind the truck and was running toward Sam—jerked out a pistol. He was about to use it on Sam at a range of something like six feet when there was a peculiar noise behind him. It was a sort of hollow klunk which, even at such a time, needed to have attention paid to it. He jerked his head around to see.
The klunk had been made by Rosie's monkey wrench, falling imperatively on the head of the second man to come out of the woods. She had carried it to use on Sam, but she used it instead on a total stranger. He fell down and lay peacefully still.
Then Sam swung a second time, at the second man to draw a pistol on him.