The Chief was close to them now and they backed away from him a little, as a guilty man always will before a stranger who is accosting him. “But say,” he answered, “you’re not going to leave us in the lurch like that, are you? It’s only the pump chain’s broken. Here, wait a minute, I brought it along to show you.”
He dived into his pocket and brought out a very serviceable-looking revolver. “Throw up your hands!” he roared at them. “Don’t move!”
At the sight of the revolver, one of the men had started to make a dive toward the side of the garage. But at the Chief’s words he halted in his tracks. “Tie em up, you fellows,” the Chief added.
One after the other, Foster bound and gagged the two swearing, foul-mouthed men, while I helped him as well as I could with my single available hand, using odds and ends of rope we found about the garage and part of the men’s overalls. Then we laid them down side by side, and not too gently, on the floor against the wall.
That done, the Chief took out a pocket torch and walked over to the wall toward which the dark fellow had made his move when first held up. We followed him.
For a long time the Chief studied it in the little glow of his torch. Then he walked back to the men. “Where’s the button, you?” he demanded. “If you want to get off light, you’d better show us.”
The fellows on the floor merely stared at him, and presently the Chief rejoined us and fell to studying the wall again. “See that tiny crack there?” he asked me, flashing his pocket torch up and down the wall slowly. “That’s where the elevator comes up, I fancy. But I have no idea how to open it. There must be a bell or a button or something around here somewhere. It probably opens from the other side.”
For a little longer the Chief searched. Then he went to the door and, standing framed in it, waved his arms. In a moment he turned back to us and in his wake filed in his silent satellites until the garage was full of them. It was exactly like a scene in a play.
“Now, you fellows, get up against this wall,” he said, “where you’ll be out of sight from here.” He was standing in front of the wall with the cracks in it. The men filed over and leaned against the same wall. The Chief turned back to the wall again, leaned down and pulled a little wire lying on the floor. I had seen it, but had taken it for a little bit of loose copper wire. When the Chief pulled it, however, I saw that it ran into the wall through a tiny hole. “Pretty clever, eh?” he inquired. “Hope they haven’t got some regular signal that they give.”
But the fates were with us now; for after a wait of perhaps two minutes, there was a little jar from behind the wall, and suddenly two sections of it swung out on hinges like a double door. It was through this door that I must have passed the night before.