Chapter XLI: The Strange Farmer

Hall and his comrades were panic-stricken; they could not seem to realize what had happened.

It was an instant before Nick fully realized the danger that had threatened him.

He had heard the terrific report and had seen the ball of fire as it descended, but he did not know for a moment that the man had been creeping up behind him until he saw the stone in his hand.

The men were at the detective again.

Suddenly the noise of horses’ hoofbeats were heard.

Hall, the leader of the outlaws, cried to his men: “It is the police; fly!”

The rascals jumped the hedge and disappeared into the park.

Was it the mounted police?

Nick listened, but the noise had ceased.

He then went to look at the motor car; it was a shattered wreck.

“I guess that was one of the closest shaves that I have had in a long time,” said Nick.

A small electric pocket flash lay on the roadside where it had been dropped by one of the men who attacked Nick.

The detective picked it up and proceeded to look over the scene of battle.

The first thing that he saw was the body of the first man that he had shot.

Nick turned him over and flashed the light in his face.

It was covered with blood; Nick wiped it away; he thought that it might be either Jack Weeden or the burglar, Billy Young.

It was neither.

“Fred Rowe,” exclaimed Nick, as he recognized the features of the corpse. “A more unprincipled scoundrel never lived. A man of good family and excellent position, he took to bad companionship, and this is his end.”

About a dozen feet farther down the road he saw the body of the man who had been stricken down by the thunderbolt.

His features had been so badly burned that Nick was unable to recognize who it had been.

While Nick was looking at the man who lay at his feet, he was seized from behind and dashed to the ground.

All of the breath was knocked out of his body by the fall.

“I guess that this is my finish,” he bitterly reflected. “I should have been more careful; I did not think that they would return.”

Nick was wrong. It was not Hall and his gang that had returned.

“Sallie, drat you! Why don’t you bring me that rope so that I can tie this critter?”

The tones in which these words were said convinced Nick that the people who had caught him were not members of the Hall band, or, if they were, they talked differently from any of the others.

“I wonder who they are?” asked Nick, of himself.

“Gosh hang it, will you hurry with that rope? I don’t want to sit here all night.”

“I reckon that you are an old crank; I have dropped it.”

“Well, hurry up and find it! I don’t want to sit on this feller; he is too slippery.”

This conversation would have been very amusing to Nick were it not for the fact that his unknown captor was sitting on his head and his face was being pressed down into the mud.

When Nick had recovered his breath, he asked, as best he could, if his captor did not think that it would be a good idea to let him up.

“I reckon that you must take me for a fool,” said the man. “I had trouble enough to get you down, to go and let you set up.”

“But you have got the wrong man,” persisted Nick.

“I am too old a bird to be caught by such fine talk. Didn’t I catch you right in the act?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Nick.

“Why, I caught you right in the same old trick of robbing people, and I don’t know but that you are the fellow that has been doing the killing around these parts.”

“Say, are you ever coming with that rope?” yelled the fellow to the woman. “Do you suppose that I asked you to get it for fun? You are slower than a freight train.”

As he turned to see if the woman had yet secured the rope, he eased up somewhat on Nick.

The detective had been waiting for this.

He drew himself together, and, with a tremendous effort, hunched his knees together and threw the fellow sprawling several paces distant, where he landed in a pool of water.

The woman had come up with the lantern now, and she was the picture of astonishment when she saw Nick standing up and her companion over in the water.

“Well, I say, who might you be?” she asked.

“I might be a good many people, but I am somebody else,” answered Nick laughingly.

“Whoever you are, there is one thing certain, and that is that you are a cool one,” she said.

“I do feel rather cool after having been pressed down into the mud by your husband there,” said Nick Carter.

“Husband, indeed!” she sniffed. “Do you suppose that I would marry an old fossil like that thing over in the water? I reckon I could get finer men than he dares to be.”

“I have not seen his face,” said Nick apologetically.

“If he was a handsome young feller like you,” continued the woman, “I might not mind.”

Nick, for the first time, took a good look at her as she stood in the glare of the lantern.

She was rawboned, with the shoulders of a husky young farmer; her hair was as fiery a red as it could possibly be; her face was disfigured by a scar that ran down the left cheek; her brilliant black eyes were the only redeeming feature of the woman’s face.

Her voice was the thing that had attracted Nick--it was discordance itself.

“I reckon you must be pretty strong to throw the old man,” she continued, with a chuckle. “He is forever bragging about how good he can rastle, and this will take him down a peg or two. He’s forever blowing about how strong he is, and how he used to win all the matches at the corner store. I am fur you, if you go at him again.”