“Yes, he filed the chain off all right,” admitted Kenny. “We might have known he’d do something like that. We should have bound his hands.”
“They’re bound now,” grimly remarked Schlump, as he tightened the knots on the rope around Tom’s wrists. It was so closely drawn as to be painful, but Tom did not murmur. He was not going to let these men know that they were hurting him.
“We’d better take that leg bracelet off,” went on one of the masked men, the larger of the two.
“Why so?” asked Schlump.
“Because the links on it might rattle just at the wrong minute,” was the answer, and the man made a peculiar motion, pointing off to the mainland which Tom could see in the distance as he stood on Loon Island.
In a few moments the young inventor was freed from the leg-iron. It was not heavy, and gave him no particular discomfort, but, all the same, he was glad to be rid of it.
“Made me feel too much like an old slave on the chain gang,” he told himself. What the man had said about the necessity of keeping quiet on Loon Island came to Tom with force now. He had a wild idea of setting up a yelling that might attract some passing oarsman or motor boat man. But he gave this idea up very soon.
“I might get help, and then, again, I might not,” Tom thought. “If I didn’t get it, these fellows would be angry at me and they might beat me up. I want to keep a whole skin as long as I can. I can do better work if I’m not injured. I wonder what their game is, anyhow? It’s a bold one—I’ll say that. And to think I made it easier for them!”
For that is exactly what Tom had done. Thinking it over as best he could amid the whirl of ideas in his brain, he came to the conclusion that he had fallen into his present plight purely by accident. The men could not have known that he would follow that mysterious, disappearing stranger. They could not have known he would go down the flight of secret steps. But he had, through a chain of circumstances, and when the scoundrels found him in their power they proceeded with their plans. Tom had actually played into their hands.
Of course he might have escaped had the motor boat contained but another quart of gasoline, but this was one of the times when Fate played against the young inventor.