“Feel up to a dog trot?”
“Half a dollar even, I 'll beat you to the deserted house.”
“Hold on, don't get to sprinting. Save your wind. An easy jog will do it.”
All three fell at once into an easy running gait, Smiley and Beveridge side by side, Pink laboring along in the rear.
Five minutes later Beveridge paused for breath. “We must have run nearly a mile by this time, boys.”
“Easily.”
“Not so loud. Doesn't it look to you as if the road turned—up ahead there?”
It did look so; and as they went on toward the turning it grew plain that they were approaching a clearing.
“Wait, boys,” whispered the special agent. “This ought to be the place,—we don't want to move quite so carelessly now. Dick, you go around to the left, and I 'll take the right; Pink, you give us two or three minutes and then move in quietly toward the clearing. In that way we shall all three close in together. Wait a few minutes now.”
The two men disappeared in the woods, one on each side of the road, and Pink was left alone in the shadows. At first he could hear now and then a low rustle as one or the other brushed through the bushes, but soon these sounds died away. He was standing in the shadow at the roadside, gazing with fixed eyes at the opening in the trees and stumps a hundred yards farther along. He wondered if the three minutes were up. It was too dark to use his watch. Waiting there under the stars, the minutes spun out amazingly; all sense of the passage of time seemed to have left him. He moved forward a few steps,—but no, it was too early; Dick and Beveridge had surely not had time to get to their positions. Still, what if he should wait too long, and not arrive in time to act in concert with the others?