“We must,” said Clement with a smile that was yet more grim. “Trap or no trap, I’m going into it. But I’m going in with my eyes open.” He patted his pocket where reposed a new pistol The Chief had given him. “I’m going in with my hand on the trigger, ready to shoot. I’m going in with an electric torch. I’m ready for all tricks—and I’ll have you with me. Armed, I suppose?”
The little detective’s hand went down to his pocket. “Automatic. Brother to the one The Chief gave you. And a good supply of magazine refills.”
“The two of us ought to be able to deal with them. But I don’t think there’ll be a trap. I can understand how I tumbled into it before. I gave the game away, I’m certain, by sending Joe Wandersun’s name in to Méduse Smythe at lunch. But here—how could there be a trap? As far as they’re concerned we’re entirely unaware that Siwash is on the train. There’s no reason or time for them to prepare traps. We’ll simply carry the day with surprise tactics—and, in any case, is there any possible other course of action open to us if we are to rescue that girl effectively and without loss of time?”
There was no other way. Now that Siwash had warned the rogues—as they thought he had done by telegraph from North Bay there was precious little time to lose—the only way to get to Neuburg, and the girl Heloise, was to follow Siwash, to him. There was no other plan so swift. And its boldness, Clement thought, must make it effective.
He would have been less sanguine had he known that in the telegraph office at North Bay, Siwash had not been sending a message but receiving one. That he had been fulfilling the instructions in that message at the moment when he had shown himself deliberately to Clement outside the telegraph office. If Clement had known all these things he might have hesitated. But he did not know.
He did not know. And when a closed car passed him groaning at the steep grade of the station yard hill at Cobalt, and following that car came another, with Xavier Gatineau, leaning out of it and calling to him, “Get in, get in, he’s in that car at the front. He’s swallowed our bait,” he got in joyfully.
Directly these things happened, Clement gleefully congratulated himself that their little comedy of deception had proved brilliantly successful. He fell back into the padded seat smiling. He watched the red rear light of the closed car in front picking up speed as it wound through the corkscrew streets of Cobalt. And his heart was saying, “To Neuburg.... To Heloise.... That car’s leading us to them.”
And in the front car Siwash Mike was chuckling. He leaned across to Joe Wandersun, who was driving, and cried, still chuckling, “They’ve bitten. They’ve bitten. They’re following.”
FOOTNOTE:
[1] A division on the C.P.R. varies in length from approximately 115 miles to 140 miles. All trains change engines and crews at such divisions.