For a minute longer the man wavered. Then the prospect of a thousand-dollar spree in Brentford’s gilded resorts overcoming even his terror of Russian vengeance, he bent over the prisoners, and began fumbling at the knots.
CHAPTER XXV.
UNEXPECTED VENGEANCE.
While he worked, Grail hurriedly plied him with questions. “Have you any idea,” he asked, “where Rezonoff was planning to take the colonel when they left here last night?”
Simmons shook his head. “I don’t know for sure,” he said. “They didn’t take me into their confidence any more than they had to. But I have a suspicion from something I heard dropped that they were planning somehow to ring the colonel’s daughter into the game.”
“The colonel’s daughter!” Grail gulped the words out, his face grown gray and tense.
“Yes. Just before they started off, I heard him say to Vance that it would be quite a family reunion to have father and daughter under——”
The sentence was destined never to be finished. Just then a pistol shot rang out from the back of the hut, and Simmons, with a shrill cry, sprang to his feet, clutching at his left hand, from which the little finger had been shot away.
A second later he was out of the hut and dashing for the cover of the horse weeds at a speed which only terror could have lent to his feet.
Grail and Cato, owing to their cramped limbs and the necessity of jerking off the last of their trammeling cords,[{47}] made slower progress; and by the time they reached the door their late companion had disappeared, the only sign of him being the rustling and swaying of the thicket as he passed through. Just entering the weeds, however, and in close pursuit, they could discern the forms of half a dozen lithe, brown-skinned little men.
Grail drew a long breath as comprehension came to him. He had not dreamed before but that the pistol shot had been aimed at Simmons by one of the returning Russians.