CHAPTER XVINZA TO THE RESCUE.
Spat—whiz—plunk! The game was still on at New London, and Frank Merriwell drove and caged a ball.
The referee’s whistle blew, denoting the close of the last period of the game; and he followed this with the announcement of the scores:
“Goals made by Yale, fifteen; by New London, four.”
Dade Morgan was gnawing his smiling lips, in his seat in the balcony.
“Curse the fellows, they have failed me!” he was thinking.
Then he saw Bascom jostle heavily against Dick Starbright! saw a sudden altercation, and beheld Bascom’s polo-stick flash through the air. When it fell, Dick Starbright fell with it.
The crowd was rising and streaming out of the building. Bascom dived to the nearest netting, which he cut away with furious slashes of a knife, leaped through the opening thus made, pushed aside the men who were there, and sprang for a small door, the position of which he had previously ascertained. Before the extent of Starbright’s injury could be known or a pursuit organized Bascom was gone.
Frank Merriwell was the first to reach Starbright. He lifted Dick and saw that the polo-stick had struck his head. There was a small gash and some blood. But Frank saw almost immediately that, though the blow had knocked Starbright senseless, its effects were not likely to be of a serious character.
A doctor came out of the crowd, and an excited group soon gathered in the “surface.”
Bart Hodge and others were trying to discover what had become of Bascom. The other members of the New London polo-team pushed into the crowd and expressed their sympathy, and were free in their declarations that Bascom must have acted in a fit of anger on the impulse of the moment and without any malice.
Dick Starbright did not long remain unconscious. The blow had been aimed well enough, but Dick’s upthrust arm had deflected it and it had fallen glancingly, producing only temporary concussion.
“Oh, he’s all right!”
The doctor said it, and the doctor laughed encouragingly. A boy pushed toward Frank with a telegram. Frank tore open the envelope and read:
“Man here with your father. I think D. S. Come quick. Will meet you at wreck with automobile.
“Inza.”
Inza Burrage had sent it from New Haven.
Frank, after a cheering word to Dick Starbright, jumped out of the room, hurrying toward the street without changing his clothing. As a short cut, he took the little door through which Bascom had fled. He was about to emerge into the light from a small and unused side entrance, when he heard a rustling and became aware that a man who had been about to leave the place ahead of him had drawn back and was now apparently in hiding.
“Bascom!” was Frank’s thought.
Before the man knew that his presence had been observed, Frank was on him, pouncing down like an eagle.
It was indeed Bascom, who had succeeded in hiding in the building, and who, fancying that the coast was now somewhat clear, had decided to venture forth and try to get out of the town before a more thorough search might reveal his place of hiding.
Frank clutched him by the throat, bore him backward to the floor, calling for assistance. Before it came, however, he had found a rope and tied Bascom up ready to turn him over to the authorities.
Then he relinquished him to Hodge, who had come with others in answer to his call. After a few words with this most faithful friend, Frank hurried away for the railway-station and telegraph-office.
There he learned that a freight had been wrecked on its way from New Haven, and that the track would not be open for some time.
Then he fully understood Inza’s message. It would be impossible for him to get through to New Haven by rail, because of this wreck; and she would be at the place where the wreck occurred, with the automobile, ready to take him on into New Haven at the highest speed of the auto, as soon as he reached her.
“Brave and quick-witted as ever!” was his thought. “I wonder what she has learned of Dion Santenel now? I thought the rascal would abandon his attempts and be afraid to return to New Haven. But I will get there, and I will thwart him in his scheme, whatever it is.”
Frank might not have been so confident if he had known just what Santenel was doing, and how he was succeeding.
“When will there be a train through to New Haven?” he asked of the agent.
“All trains abandoned,” was the answer.
“What about a wrecking-train?”
“It won’t take passengers, and it will go no farther than the wreck.”
Frank did not ask anything more, except the distance the wreck had occurred from New Haven. He heard two men talking, and from their conversation learned that the wrecking-train would be along in ten or fifteen minutes, from some city down the road, and that the chances were it would go through New London without making a stop.
Frank’s mind was at once made up. He would try to get on that wrecking-train, even if he had to make a flying leap for it at great risk from the New London platform. Then he sent a message to Inza.
“Ten minutes to spare, anyway!” he reflected. “I’ll make a change in my clothes.”
Hurrying back to the polo-rink for this purpose, he thought over the message from Inza. There was a possibility that she might have been deceived as to the identity of the man who was with his father, but Frank knew that her eyes were keen. The chances were that she was not deceived. In that case, there could be no doubt that the elder Merriwell was in serious peril.
The thought that he might be too late made Frank wish for a special train for the scene of the wreck; but that could not be had in New London. Nor was anything to be gained by trying to hire a special engine. He decided that if he missed the wrecking-train he would try to get a special engine by wire.
When he returned to the station, having been stopped on the way by crowds of enthusiastic men who insisted on shaking hands with him over the great fight he and his men had made in the polo-game, he sent a telegram to Selton Dirk, the little New Haven detective whom he had more than once employed, asking Dirk to call on his father at the New Haven House and do what in his judgment he thought proper.
“Dirk is quick and he’ll catch on,” was Frank’s thought, as he gave this message to the operator and asked him to hurry it through. The message went through; but Frank did not know until later that Dirk was out of the city and that it could not reach him.
The whistle of the engine of the special wrecking-train was heard at this moment. Its character told him that the train was not to stop.
Frank remained close against the wall of the station until the engine whirled in sight, then walked toward it.
Five miles out from New Haven, at the scene of the wreck, Inza Burrage sat in Frank Merriwell’s automobile, with smiling confidence. She had received his message, which said he would reach that point on the first train through, and she believed he would do so, even though the men who were plowing round the wreck with spades and picks told her that the big wrecking-train, whose coming they anxiously awaited, would not stop at New London, and that her friend could not possibly come through on that.
When the train came and stopped at the wreck Inza found her faith in Merriwell justified. He was in the caboose of the wrecking-train; and, leaping down the clay embankment, he extended his hands to her, climbing at once into the automobile.
“I knew you’d be waiting for me!” he said, starting the machine.
“And I knew that you would come, even though the men at the wreck told me you couldn’t. You always do the things that other men can’t do, or are too timid to do, and I knew it would be so this time.”
“It was very simple,” Frank answered. “There were some empty flat cars on the New London siding. I climbed upon these, took a good run along them as if I was going at a hurdle when the wrecking-train came along, and jumped from them to a flat car of the train. It was a lively jump, but I made it. The conductor didn’t want me there, and said I oughtn’t to be there, and some other things, but he was in too big a hurry to stop and put me off, as I knew he would be, and I came right through at a double quick, without further trouble.”
He gave the lever a touch and sent the automobile forward at its highest speed.
“Father?” he questioned simply.
“I’m sure that Santenel is with him! I shouldn’t have thought anything about it, if you hadn’t told me that awful story of the Hindu. I saw this man, and some way I was sure he was the Hindu, for you’ll recollect that I saw the Hindu at the charity fair. Well, I followed him along Chapel Street, saw him enter the New Haven House, and heard him ask to have his card taken up to Charles Conrad Merriwell! Perhaps I was a bit bold in following him into the New Haven House, but I thought it a thing I ought to do, and there was no time to get any one else to do it.
“Before venturing to send you the telegram I hired a boy on the street to go again to the New Haven House and ask the proprietor if Mr. Merriwell could be seen, and he came back and said that Mr. Merriwell was busily engaged and was to be seen by no one. Then I sent you the telegram, and as soon as I got your answer I started for this point with your automobile.”
For a time there was nothing heard but the br-r-r-r-r of the automobile, as it took the straight road before it like a racer under Frank’s manipulation. He had an inner feeling that Inza’s keen eyes had seen and perceived the truth, and that his father was in the greatest peril of his life.
The feeling that makes a cat love to toy with a mouse which is helpless in its power and half-unconscious filled the soul of Dion Santenel.
“If Frank Merriwell should learn that I am here he could not reach me, unless he has the wings of a bird!” the villain chuckled, as he looked at Charles Conrad Merriwell. “If he should telegraph Selton Dirk, Dirk is in New York City, sent there on a mission by one of my trusted agents. If any ordinary policeman should attempt to touch me, I should simply laugh at him and make the fellow go away feeling worse than a sneak for having suspected me. Everything has worked to my hand. Frank is away, and can’t even dream of the plot that sent him away, and I am free to work my will!”
Then he began again to talk to the elder Merriwell, speaking in the droning way he sometimes delighted to affect, again playing with the helpless man like the cat with the mouse. By and by he took up the statement which Merriwell had prepared at his dictation, smilingly read it, and placed it on the table in a conspicuous manner, with a paper-weight to hold it down.
After that, he looked through the notes bearing the signature of Charles Conrad Merriwell, ascertained that they were all right in every way on their surface, and tucked them away in an inner pocket in a leather wallet.
“Come! It’s time to go!” he said, speaking to Merriwell.
Merriwell aroused.
“Yes?”
“You will take the electric car at this corner for the boat landings. There you will hire a boat or steal one, row out a half-mile from shore, and throw yourself overboard and sink. This letter on the table will explain to the world why. This is my command. You will do it. You obeyed me in the mine and fired the blast that shut you in; you must obey me as implicitly in this. I will it, and my will is now your law. Go!”
His face had assumed a wolfish look, and his eyes were again shooting out their red gleams.
“Yes!”
Merriwell made the promise and rose to his feet to carry it out, as completely subjected to the will of the man before him as if he were an automaton.
“But I will go first,” said Santenel, speaking to Charles Merriwell. “Ten minutes after I am gone you will leave this house and carry out my instructions. Good-by!”
“Victory is mine!” chuckled Santenel, as he turned to leave the room.
At that moment there was a whirr of wheels and the br-r-r-r of an automobile in the street, which stopped in front of the house. A second later and a knock sounded on the door.
Santenel muttered a malediction, but walked to the door and opened it.
The colored boy stood there, and with him Frank Merriwell.
Before Santenel could recover from his surprise and mentally resume his pretended character of “Fisher Stokes,” the broker, Frank crowded through the doorway and stood before him.
“You scoundrel!” Frank hissed, and with a swoop of his hand he tore away the false mustache and imperial.
With a cry of defeat and fear Santenel leaped at Frank, and was stricken to the floor, where he lay in a senseless heap.
Frank Merriwell had come in time!