There was a scampering of heavily booted men as his soldiers rushed to obey their officer’s orders, and he did not proceed any farther. He knew his men were all with him.
As Nick Carter had easily conjectured, they were all “picked” men.
Four or five of them had already reached the road away from the bowlders, and were taking up their positions to command the car with their carbines, when, from the other end of the pass, arose a frenzied howl of alarm.
“Look! Look!” shouted the soldier who had gone a little farther along the pass than his comrades. “It’s a charge! What are we to do!”
The soldier was so terrified that he turned to see which way to run. But the other troopers were behind him, and he could not escape.
They were standing only about a hundred feet from the end of the pass.
A moment later the car came out of the pass like a torpedo. It cleared the hundred feet at a single leap. Nick Carter had no time to steer clear of the soldiers crowding into the roadway.
The fact that he knew they would have sent a shattering volley into the car if they had had time, consoled him somewhat for the desperate action he was compelled to take.
Like a great juggernaut, the automobile plunged through the ranks of the startled troopers—a very fiend of devastation!
From the road arose a chorus of heavy groans and maddened shrieks, and the swaying of the front wheels told Nick Carter and his companions that they were making an awful pathway over living bodies.