With every turn he made he looked up at the hamper with his rolling red eyes, and indulged in a low, threatening growl.
It was as much as to say: “Don’t come out, or I’ll make a meal of you!”
His huge jaws hung apart and were froth-flecked, and Patsy, venturing once to peer out at him, did not like his looks.
“He’d make mince-meat of me in less than ten seconds if I undertook to leap out there,” he said to himself, with gruesome misgivings. “Yet if I remain here and he there, I am as good as discovered by these crooks. I’m blessed if this hasn’t developed into a mighty ugly situation.”
As a matter of fact, he could see no immediate way out of it.
He was so cramped and twisted in his close quarters that he could not draw his revolver without rising up in the hamper, and he knew that the dog would instantly attack him if he ventured doing that.
His muscles were so cramped, moreover, that he knew he could not move to advantage for several moments after his release.
He realized, furthermore, that the report of his revolver, in case he attempted to shoot the dog, would speedily bring Badger and his confederates to the spot, and that the result might possibly be fatal to himself, or, at least, to Nick’s designs, to corner and arrest the entire gang.
So for upward of five minutes the situation hung fire, Patsy waiting and wondering, and the bloodhound still growling and trotting to and fro some six feet away.