"I"d rather the sheriffs would lug the detectives out of the country,"
Chester observed. "They"re the people who are looking for father."
"You want to keep mighty quiet about any one looking for your father,"
Will advised. "We are sure to bunt into these two sheriffs before long and if they know that your father is now regarded as a fugitive from justice, they"ll get him and ship him back to Chicago, all right!"
"The sheriffs got held up by the train robbers," Tommy went on, "but they can"t be blamed for that, and they tried to put us through the third degree when they thought we were in cahoots with the robbers, but they"re game all the same. If you ever see those fellows in action you"ll know there"s something going on."
"And we"re going to see them in action right now!" cried George.
A succession of shots came from the entrance to the old channel, and the boys heard the defenders scrambling down toward the chamber where they stood.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE FINDING OF WAGNER
"Good night!" cried Tommy.
The heavy footsteps came on faster than before. The ping of bullets was in the air, and the old channel was filling with powder smoke. Now and then the flash of a gun lit the pa.s.sage.
"Me for the tall timber," Tommy went on, springing up the tunnel.
"Here! Where are you going?" shouted Will.
"There"s a hiding place up here!" answered Tommy. "We saw it when we came down! Me for the hiding place."
"That"s a fact!" Will exclaimed turning to Chester. "You remember the old channel running in from the southeast?"
"We"ll have to get somewhere right soon!" Chester answered. "Perhaps that is as good a place as any."
Bullets singing down the narrow pa.s.sage indicated that the sheriffs and their men had already entered the subterranean channel from above.
The train robbers were defending the pa.s.sage heroically, but the officers were coming bravely on.
Directly the boys came to the lead which cut the south wall of the main channel into the shape of a "W." They pa.s.sed on up this dry channel just as the train robbers, retreating step by step, came to the entrance.
"Shoot to kill!" the boys heard one of the outlaws saying.
"Do you know the way to the other end?" asked the second outlaw.
"I"ve been told how to find it," was the answer, "but I never made my way through it. Those sheriffs are game to come crowding into a hole like this in front of two armed and desperate men."
"You get up against the real thing when you strike a Wyoming sheriff,"
the other outlaw declared.
"Throw up your hands!" a heavy voice came from above.
"Come and take us!" was the only answer.
Another storm of bullets was followed by a groan of pain.
"They got me!" the boys heard one of the men say.
"They got me, too!" said the other. "It"s a wonder we haven"t been cut into ribbons before this!"
"All we can do now is to lay down and shoot as long as we"ve got ammunition," the first speaker advised.
"You may as well surrender, boys!" They heard Sheriff Pete"s heavy voice saying. "I"m coming down there after you!"
The only answer from the outlaws was a volley of bullets, punctuated with oaths. Tommy turned to Will with a low chuckle.
"This seems to be a nice quiet Boy Scout excursion, doesn"t it?" he asked. "We come up on the mountains to have a pleasant vacation, and we b.u.t.t into a scene that wouldn"t be admitted to the stage of any theatre because the critics would say that it wasn"t true to life!"
"We certainly do strike life in the raw!" replied Will.
"Are you going to surrender?" shouted the sheriff from above.
"I"ll bet they don"t," whispered George.
"You"re on!" Tommy shouted. "I"ll bet they do."
The boys listened anxiously for the reply.
"I"m coming down there now!" they heard Sheriff Pete say.
"There isn"t one man in a million who would dare walk into a trap like this," Will mused. "I wonder if this sheriff we"ve been finding fault with will have the nerve to do it."
"You see if he hasn"t got the nerve to do it," Tommy answered.
The outlaws fired once more, and then the boys heard their weapons clattering down the tunnel.
"That"s the stuff, boys!" the sheriff said.
They heard him sliding and scrambling down the channel, and turned on their flashlights. The sheriff paused with an exclamation of surprise, but came steadily on in a moment, his deputies not far in the rear.
"Throw up your hands there, you with the light!" cried the officer.
"I ain"t going to throw up my hands," Tommy called out with a chuckle, "but if it"ll give you any satisfaction, I"ll throw up my job as a man-hunter. I have no further use for it!"
"That must be the Boy Scouts," the voice of the Sweet.w.a.ter sheriff said.
"I wonder how they got here."
As the officers came on under the rays of the searchlights, the boys having now stepped into the main tunnel, the outlaws stumbled to their feet and stood leaning against the wall. They were wounded in several places and blood was flowing quite freely, but their jaws were set in lines of determination.
The sheriffs glanced keenly about and smiled as their eyes took in the boys grouped together in the tunnel.