One after another of three men leaped from the car. The man on the rear platform sprang down and joined them.
They ran back over the roadbed, while the deserted car surged onward for nearly fifty yards before stopping, before the engineer and baggage hands began a more active and energetic investigation.
The four men then were a hundred yards down the track, invisible in the faint starlight at that distance. Other figures appeared from amid the gloomy woods. The burdens lying on the roadbed, one more than the scoundrels had figured upon, were quickly seized and removed—into the depths of the forest that flanked the railway for miles in that locality.
Much can be quickly accomplished by determined men under such desperate circumstances.
Only eight minutes had passed since the Southern Limited had left North Dayton.
Something like three minutes later, Chick Carter, followed by half a score of men anxious to learn what had occurred, came running up the track and joined the engineer and other train hands then gathered in and around the looted express car.
Chick saw at a glance that the trick had, indeed, been turned; also that Nick Carter was missing.
“Great guns!” he exclaimed to himself. “This is strange, mighty strange, and where in thunder is Cady?”
Chick decided to listen briefly before revealing his identity and what he knew about the case, a self-restraint which few would have had under such circumstances, and he very soon determined to say nothing.
For the engineer and train hands, familiar with the desolate section of the country, quickly came to two conclusions; one, that Cady had been overcome by the robbers who had been concealed in the empty packing cases; the other, that he had been carried away with the plunder from the open safe by a gang of desperadoes whom it would be useless to pursue at that time.