“Hush! Quick. Man’s crawling up the hillside, with a long rifle that looks like business. I wonder what—”
From the nearest clump of bushes suddenly came a harsh loud voice:
“Well, you young fellers won’t wonder long! You-all better come with me.”
A tall man in home-spun, tall, gaunt, fierce as a wild beast, was covering them with his rifle. From the other bushes rose a dozen men, young and old, all savage as the first mountaineer.
Hike started to explain that the tetrahedral was not an anarchist machine or anything like that, but the first man bade him to “Shut up!”
The hill where the Hustle had landed was the center of a camp of moonshiners, who had been driven from their stills by a big raid by revenue officers. They had fled here, with rifles, bags of corn-meal, bacon and whiskey, and were waiting for the revenue officers to try to creep in on them from the mountains about. When they had seen the tetrahedral swoop down, they had immediately thought it a new method of the “revenuers,” and they believed the boys—too young to be officers—treacherous spies.
So much Hike gathered from their threats and sneers. He saw that Poodle and he must either escape or be lynched. Poodle, who was looking around in a scared way at the scowling ring of men with ready rifles, was not too scared to whisper, “We’d better beat it. We’ll be late in getting to Washington you know, if we get lynched.”
Hike had a plan. Addressing the leader, he explained that they had nothing to do with the revenue officers, and that he would prove it if the leader would step into the machine and examine their papers.
Very suspicious, the leader refused to do more than approach. He demanded to see the papers outside. Hike leaned over a storage battery, and suddenly the leader stood as stiff as though he had been turned to marble.
For the first time, Hike had used the Paralyzing Wave!