“Look out!” Mazie screamed, as with a growl of rage and pain the larger of the two captives sprang through an opening, free!
And what of Johnny and the Chief? They had gone rushing after that man whom Johnny had so rashly named the firebug. He had led them straight away across a level stretch of grass, across a drive and through a clump of bushes to the shore of the lake. There, with a speed that was astonishing in so large a man who was at the same time a little lame, with cold spray drenching him, he ran on along the stone breakwater to a spot where a second breakwater ran off at a sharp angle to the first. This wall of stone which ran between two stretches of foaming water reached to a fill some distance out in the lake. It was incomplete. Only rough and jagged piles of rock marked its course; as yet there were no beams.
At such a time as this, when seas were running high, it was little less than suicide to venture out upon it; yet the mysterious man did not hesitate an instant. One second he was on the solid shore, the next he was balancing himself on a jagged pile of rocks five yards out to sea, and then he was lost to view in a cloud of spray.
The man had probably figured that his pursuers would not dare to follow. In this he was partly wrong. Johnny’s foot was on the foremost rock when the Chief’s firm hand pulled him back.
“Wait,” he rumbled, “he can’t make it. He’ll have to come back.”
They did wait, and for a time it seemed that the Chief was certainly right; that the man would never succeed in making his way to the broad stretch of filled land which ran for more than a mile along the lake front, and where he might either hide or make his way back to land over some pier or safer breakwater. But, as the spray cleared, they saw him twenty yards out, now thirty, forty, fifty, sixty. Then, for a long time, as the water boomed against the rocks, the spray completely hid the fleeing form.
Then, of a sudden, the moon came out and the spray cleared for a moment. At that moment, after sharply surveying the length of the breakwater, the Chief and Johnny turned to stare at one another.
“Gone!” said Johnny.
“Not a living thing there now.”
“He can’t have made his way to the fill.”