He pointed the light straight at Pee-wee, holding the open jack-knife in his other hand, and glared at him with a look which struck terror to the boy's heart. Pee-wee was too frightened and exhausted to answer. He only shook his head in acknowledgment, breathing heavily.
In a few minutes the train had come abreast of them and stopped. They could hear the weary puffing of the engine, and voices calling and occasionally they caught the gleam of a lantern through the crack in the car. Pee-wee remained very still. The convict took his stand in the middle of the car between the two sliding doors, lowering and alert, holding the flashlight and the clasp knife.
Soon the train moved again, then stopped. There were calls from one end of it to the other. Then it started again and continued to move until Pee-wee thought it was going away, and his hope revived at the thought that escape might yet be possible. Then the sound came nearer again and presently the car received a jolt, accompanied by a bang. The convict was thrown a little, but he resumed his stand, waiting, desperate, menacing. Those few minutes must have been dreadful ones to him as he watched the two doors, knife in hand.
Then came more shunting and banging and calling and answering, a short, shrill whistle and more moving and then at last the slow, continuous progress of the car, which was evidently now at last a part of that endless miscellaneous procession, rattling along through the night with its innumerable companions.
"It's lucky for them," said the convict, through his teeth, as he relaxed.
Pee-wee hardly knew what he meant, he had scarcely any interest, and it was difficult to hear on account of the noise. He was too shaken up to think clearly, but he wondered, as the rattling train moved slowly along, how long he could go without food, how he would get back from Buffalo, and whether this dreadful companion of his would take his stand, like an animal at bay, whenever the train stopped.
After a little time, when he was able to get a better grip on himself and realize fully his terrible plight, he began to think how, after all, the scout, with all his resource and fine courage, his tracking and his trailing and his good turns, is pretty helpless in a real dilemma. Here was an adventure, and rather too much of a one, and neither he nor any other scout could extricate him from his predicament. In books they could have done it with much brave talk, but in real life they could do nothing. He was tired and frightened and helpless; the shock of the pressure of those brutal fingers about his neck still distressed him, and his head ached from it all.
What wonder if in face of this tragical reality, the scouts with all their much advertised resource and prowess should lose prestige a little in his thoughts? Yet it might have been worth while for him to pause and reflect that though the scout arm is neither brutal nor menacing, it still has an exceedingly long reach and that it can pin you just as surely as the cruel fingers which had fixed themselves on his own throat.
But he was too terrified and exhausted to think very clearly about anything.