“Get down in the sleigh, girls—down!” he commanded. “Look out for bullets! Hands up, you two fellows—put your hands up, quick! Quick, I tell you, or I’ll fire!”
He had drawn a pistol and his tone was so earnest that the men must have known that he would use it. They were amazed for the moment.
“I am the sheriff of this county. I believe you are two fellows for whom I have been looking. Tom Davis—Scar-Faced Tom—I recognize you from the warden’s description. You were discharged from the Meadville penitentiary only a week ago, and it looks very much to me as though you were going back there again.”
The man whom the sheriff addressed—the redoubtable “Scar-Faced Tom”—was not a little cowed by the sheriff’s speech—and extremely so by the business-like look of the revolver. But while Mr. Kimball kept this fellow under surveillance, and Mr. Parker was still lying stunned in the snow, the other fellow dived into the darkness and the storm, yelling for the third, who had remained with the motor iceboat.
The sheriff sent a pistol ball after him; but he would better have refrained. Tom Davis, seizing his opportunity (as he thought) made a great stride for the sheriff as the flame of the discharged revolver flashed right over his shoulder.
Davis would have had Kimball by the throat had it not been for the county clerk. The latter struggled to a sitting posture just at the right moment, and seized the villain’s ankle. He twisted it and, roaring, the man went down.
Sheriff Kimball tossed his pistol to Mr. Parker, and jumped on the fallen robber’s back. His attack was so unexpected that the other was helpless and it seemed as though the sheriff was going to make one capture, at least, without much trouble.
Mildred and Lettie were about as scared as they could be. The firing of the sheriff’s pistol, and the rough tones and fighting seemed terrible to both the doctor’s daughter and her chum.
Once Mildred had been troubled by tramps in the swamp up near Karnac Lake; but Dan had rescued her at that time. So it was not strange that now she should cry aloud:
“Oh, dear, me! I wish Dan were here.”