The door to the room, which opened outward, banged shut. The lock had been broken by us in forcing an entrance. There must have been two of them out in the hall, for we heard the noise and sc.r.a.ping of feet, as they piled up heavy furniture against the door, dragging it from the next room before we could do anything. Piece after piece was wedged in between our door and the opposite wall.

We could hear them taunt us as they worked, and I thought I recognised at once the voice of the stocky keeper of the garage, the Boss, whom I had heard so often before over our detectaphone. The other voice, which seemed to me to be disguised, I found somewhat familiar, yet I could not place it. It must have been, I thought, that of the man whom we had come to know and fear under the appellation of the Chief.

We could hear them laugh, now, as they cursed us and wished us luck with our capture. It was galling.

Evidently, too, they had not much use for Forbes, and, indeed, at such a crisis I do not think he would have been much more than an additional piece of animated impedimenta. Dissipation had not added anything to the physical prowess of Forbes.

With a parting volley of profanity, they stamped down the narrow stairs to the ground floor, and a few seconds afterward we could hear them back of the house, working over the machine which we had followed up from New York earlier in the day. Evidently there were several machines in the barn which served them as garage, but this was the handiest.

They had cranked it up, and were debating which way they should go.

"The shots came from the direction of the main road," the Boss said.

"We had better go in the opposite direction. There may be more of them coming. Hurry up!"

At least, it seemed, there had been only three of them in this refuge which they had sought up in the hills and valleys of the Ramapos. Of that we could now be reasonably certain. One of them we had captured--and had ourselves been captured into the bargain.

I stuck my head out of the window to look at the other two down below, only to feel myself dragged unceremoniously back by Garrick.

"What's the use of taking that risk, Tom?" he expostulated. "One shot from them and you would be a dead one."

Fortunately they had not seen me, so intent were they on getting away.

They had now seated themselves in the car and, as Garrick had suspected, could not resist delivering a parting shot at us, emptying the contents of an automatic blindly up at our window. Garrick and I were, as it happened, busy on the opposite side of the room.

All thought of Forbes was dropped for the present. Garrick said not a word but continued at work in the corner of the room by the other broken window.

"Either they must have succeeded in getting out after the first shot and so escaped the fumes," muttered Garrick finally, "and hid in the stable, or, perhaps, they were out there at work anyhow. Still that makes little difference now. They must have seen us go in, have followed us quietly, and then caught us here."

With a hasty final imprecation, the car below started forward with a jerk and was swallowed up in the darkness.

CHAPTER XXII

THE MAN HUNT

Here we were, locked in a little room on the top floor of the mysterious house. I looked out of both windows. There was no way to climb down and it was too far to jump, especially in the uncertain darkness. I threw myself at the door. It had been effectually braced by our captors.

Garrick, in the meantime, had lighted the light again, and placed it by the window.

Forbes, now partly recovered, was rambling along, and Garrick, with one eye on him and the other on something which he was working over in the light, was too busy to pay much attention to my futile efforts to find a means of escape.

At first we could not make out what it was that Forbes was trying to tell us, but soon, as the fresh air in the room revived him, his voice became stronger. Apparently he recognised us and was trying to offer an explanation of his presence here.

"He kidnapped me--brought me here," Forbes was muttering. "Three days--I've been shut up in this room."

"Who brought you here?" I demanded sharply.

"I don't know his name--man at the gambling place--after the raid--said he'd take me in his car somewhere--from the other place back of it--last I remember--must have drugged me--woke up here--all I know."

"You've been a prisoner, then?" I queried.

"Yes," he murmured.

"A likely story," I remarked, looking questioningly at Garrick who had been listening but had not ceased his own work, whatever it was. "What are you going to do, Guy? We can't stay here and waste time over such talk as this while they are escaping. They must be almost to the road now, and turning down in the opposite direction from Dillon and his man."

Garrick said nothing. Either he was too busy solving our present troubles or he was, like myself, not impressed by Forbes' incoherent story. He continued to adjust the little instrument which I had seen him draw from his pocket and now recognised as the thing which looked like a telephone transmitter. Only, the back of it seemed to gleam with a curious brightness under the rays of the light, as he handled it.

"They have somehow contrived to escape the effect of the bombs," he was saying, "and have surprised us in the room on the top floor where the light is. We are up here with a young fellow named Forbes, whom we have captured. He's the young man that I saw several times at the gambling joint and was at dinner with Warrington the night when the car was stolen. He was pretty badly overcome by the fumes, but I've brought him around. He either doesn't know much or won't tell what he knows. That doesn't make any difference now, though. They have escaped in a car.

They are leaving by the road. Wait. I'll see whether they have reached it yet. No, it's too dark to see and they have no light on the car. But they must have turned. They said they were going in the direction opposite from you."

"Well?" I asked, mystified. "What of it? I know all that, already."

"But Dillon doesn't," replied Garrick, in great excitement now. "I knew that we should have to have some way of communicating with him instantly if this fellow proved to be as resourceful as I believed him to be. So I thought of the radiophone or photophone of Dr. Alexander Graham Bell. I have really been telephoning on a beam of light."

"Telephoning on a beam of light?" I repeated incredulously.

"Yes," he explained, feeling now at liberty to talk since he had delivered his call for help. "You see, I talk into this transmitter.

The simplest transmitter for this purpose is a plane mirror of flexible material, silvered mica or microscope gla.s.s. Against the back of this mirror my voice is directed. In the carbon transmitter of the telephone a variable electrical resistance is produced by the pressure on the diaphragm, based on the fact that carbon is not as good a conductor of electricity under pressure as when not. Here, the mouthpiece is just a sh.e.l.l supporting a thin metal diaphragm to which the mirror on the back is attached, an apparatus for transforming the air vibrations produced by the voice into light vibrations of the projected beam, which is reflected from this light here in the room. The light reflected is thus thrown into vibrations corresponding to those in the diaphragm."

"And then?" I asked impatiently.

"That varying beam of light shoots out of this room, and is caught by the huge reflector which you saw me set up at the foot of that tall tree which you can just see against the dark sky over there. That parabolic mirror gathers in the scattered rays, focusses them on the selenium cell which you saw in the middle of the reflector, and that causes the cell to vary the amount of electric current pa.s.sing through it from a battery of storage cells. It is connected with a very good telephone receiver. Every change in the beam of light due to the vibrations of my voice is caught by that receiving mirror, and the result is that the diaphragm in the receiver over there which Dillon is holding to his ear responds. The thing is good over several hundred yards, perhaps miles, sometimes. Only, I wish it would work both ways.

I would like to feel sure that Dillon gets me."

I looked at the simple little instrument with a sort of reverence, for on it depended the momentous question of whether we should be released in time to pursue the two who were escaping in the automobile.

"You'll have to hurry," continued Garrick, speaking into his transmitter. "Give the signal. Get the car ready. Anything, so long as it is action. Use your own judgment."

There he was, flashing a message out of our prison by an invisible ray that shot across the Cimmerian darkness to the point where we knew that our friends were waiting anxiously. I could scarcely believe it. But Garrick had the utmost faith in the ability of the radiophone to make good.

"They MUST have started by this time," he cried, craning his neck out of the window and looking in every direction.

Forbes was still rambling along, but Garrick was not paying any attention to him. Instead, he began rummaging the room for possible evidence, more for something to do than because he hoped to find anything, while we were waiting anxiously for something to happen.

An exclamation from Garrick, however, brought me to his side. Tucked away in a bureau drawer under some soiled linen that plainly belonged to Forbes, he drew out what looked like a single blue-steel tube about three inches long. At its base was a hard-rubber cap, which fitted snugly into the palm of the hand as he held it. His first and middle fingers encircled the barrel, over a steel ring. A pull downward and the thing gave a click.

"Good that it wasn't loaded," Garrick remarked. "I knew what the thing was, all right, but I didn't think the spring was as delicate as all that. It is a new and terrible weapon of destruction of human life, one that can be carried by the thug or the burglar and no one be the wiser, unless he has occasion to use it. It is a gun that can be concealed in the palm of the hand. A pull downward on that spring discharges a thirty-two calibre, centre fire cartridge. The most dangerous feature of it is that the gun can be carried in an upper vest pocket as a fountain pen, or in a trousers pocket as a penknife."

I looked with added suspicion now, if not a sort of respect, on the young man who was tossing, half conscious, on the bed. Was he, after all, not the simple, gullible Forbes, but a real secret master of crime?

Garrick, keen though he had been over the discovery, was in reality much more interested just now in the result of his radiophone message.

What would be the outcome?

I had been startled to see that almost instantly after his second call over the radiophone there seemed to rise on all sides of us lights and the low baying of dogs.

"What's all that?" I asked Garrick.