At the window above, all unsuspected, sat the strange man of the red face and fiery nose; and he chuckled audibly when he saw the panic his little bomb had created.
The two border pards were in the main street, on Wild Bill’s fast horse, and were getting out of Scarlet Gulch at almost railroad speed.
“Ho, ho!” cackled the man at the window, as he saw them go. “See what a great splutteration a little smoke and fire kindleth!” He peered down into the street.
“To see the combobberation that thing kicked up one would think that a dozen men are lying dead down there! Yet I’ll bet, unless some of ’em got burned a bit by the fire, not a single man Jack of ’em is hurt in the least.”
It was true, as the members of the mob were already beginning to discover. If the thing that had exploded in their midst had been a bomb of deadly character, it had not harmed a man. As soon as they saw that, their shattered courage began to return.
Rainey and Bug-eye Slocum began to roar their wrath again, and to shout commands to their followers.
“Foller ’em!” yelled Rainey.
“Those bomb-hurling miscreants, who had imported the methods of Russia into this land of the free and home of the brave, must be captured at once,” screeched Slocum, oratorical even in his rage. “What, ho!” he yelled. “A hundred simoleons to the man what brings either one of ’em back, dead or alive!”
No one was heartless enough at the moment—or thought enough, perhaps it ought to be said—to ask Bug-eye where he expected to get the hundred dollars he offered so freely, for not once in a decade was he known to have so much money.
No one stopped to question. They were furious as baffled foxhounds, and all were yelping, to the effect that the escaping men must be pursued and brought back, and hung for this outrage.