He had halted the posse behind the brow of the last hill. The people from Fairchild, who were to come in around the lake from the west, weren’t in sight yet.
He waited until he saw the first pair of headlights on the shore road before he signaled his drivers and kicked the motorcycle into action.
Down in the bungalow the approaching headlights caused a sudden flurry. Speeding down the hill, Bradley saw dark figures piling into the sedan. That didn’t worry him then; the sedan wasn’t going anywhere.
But it did go somewhere. Blocked from both directions as he started his engine, the driver had made a wild sweep and plunged wildly into a narrow wood-road that came in near the bungalow. That was a road too obscure to be marked on the map, so little used that even Bradley had forgotten its existence.
Desperate, he swung into it after the fleeing machine, his posse stringing out behind him. The sedan had a lead of a couple of hundred yards and held it. That road had never been built for a motorcycle speedway. The best Bradley could do was hang on.
A mile north of the lake the machine gun opened on him. He gave himself up as the branches began to snap about him, but the gun went silent after the first burst. Jammed, he hoped. If it wasn’t, he’d be riding to his finish. He was on that sedan’s tail to stay until the bitter end.
That narrow, winding road had to go somewhere, and eventually, just as the machine gun started spouting lead again, it got there — got there so suddenly that the sedan went crazily sliding on the sleety cement of the highway into which it poured itself.
Bradley thought for a horrified instant that the big car was going to turn over with Duncan’s baby in it. He had a flash of her white face and scared eyes as he whizzed past the rocking car.
At that speed and on such pavement he couldn’t stop, once he had shot into the highway.
The sedan, righting itself, had made a complete turn. It was behind him as he braked down — behind him, and coming. Back of it the lights of the first of the fleet of pursuit cars racing through the wood-road shone bright on the wet concrete.
Bradley opened his throttle, warned to get going by the renewed rattle of the machine gun. It had been cleared somewhere along the wood-road and now he was being peppered from the rear.
When he dared look back, he had put a quarter mile between him and the sedan. Another quarter mile back he could see first one car and then another of the pursuing fleet skid into the highway and straighten out to the chase.
He knew this road, knew exactly where he was on it. It was a straightaway cut, just opened this year, between Barlows and the village of Lansdowne in the next county. Bar-lows lay twenty-odd miles ahead, and there was nothing else ahead short of Barlows but a railroad crossing and an invisible county line.
Bradley did some lightning calculating while he was pulling out of machine-gun range. There was an all-night garage at Barlows, a favorite stop with truckmen. If there were several trucks there tonight, could he possibly get to Barlows far enough ahead of the kidnapers so there’d be time for him to swing out the trucks across their path and block them at the edge of town?
Holding them for just a couple of minutes would be enough to cook their goose, for some of the pursuit cars were almost as speedy as the sedan. They weren’t being left behind fast now, and they’d certainly keep plugging along.
His motorcycle, hands down, was faster than anything on four wheels not built for the race-track. He could cover five miles to the sedan’s four. How much time would that give him in Barlows to organize his blockade? Enough? And would enough trucks be there?
They’d have to be, he grimly told himself. Beyond Barlows lay the big woods — safety for the kidnapers, and either death for the child or political ruin for the Governor. Once the sedan had plunged into that maze of forest extending deep into Canada, police alarms would mean nothing. And short of the big woods the posse would be hopelessly outdistanced and he himself out of gas and out of the chase.
It was a slim chance, but the best chance — the only chance he could see then. A few minutes after he had let out his final notch of speed, though, he was debating another chance that flashed to his mind as the hoot of a distant whistle came to him over the hills. That was the night train, Canada-bound, whistling at the Canada Pike crossing five miles east. In just five minutes that long string of Pullmans would be reaching this road.
The crossing was still several miles ahead, he didn’t know exactly how many. But if he could get there in time, could in any way manage to flag the flyer — what a barricade!
He threw another glance over his shoulder from the top of the long hill. The sedan was far behind him now, and the pursuit still gamely coming along in the remoter distance.
A long chance, but worth a try! It was a time for long chances and for desperate ones. Splashing, mud-covered, sleet-beaten, Bradley made for the crossing. Squarely in the middle of it, he stopped the motorcycle and kicked it up on its stand, back to the panting locomotive just letting go another blast at the whistle post for this crossing. The train was a quarter mile away. Exactly a quarter mile. That was always the distance from whistle post to crossing.
Yes — or no? Would the flyer stop, or wouldn’t it? That tail light of his, thought of at the last moment, wasn’t a very bright light. But it was a red light — and didn’t red mean, “Stop?”
It did. Or else the engineer had seen the motorcycle, apparently stalled on the tracks, at the same time he saw the tail light on rounding the curve. Behind Bradley as the great spotlight hit him, powerful air-brakes were screeching.
But the Limited kept coming. He stayed where he was, engine racing, until it was no more than a hundred yards away, still plowing on. Then it was time to move. He did move, but he didn’t get off the track. Suddenly he had realized what would probably happen if he did. The engineer would curse him out of the cab window and pick up speed, and the flyer would go on.
He didn’t mean to let it go on. Not now. Not when another grip of the brakes would halt it.
Not when that big sedan racing down at the crossing was this close to being stopped!
Jaw set, motorcycle crazily bouncing, Bradley went up the track over the ties. Ten yards. Twenty yards. Thirty. And the Limited, brakes again grinding, was blowing its hot breath down his neck, traveling faster than he could.
He knew it would stop then. His job was done. Desperately he jerked his handlebar at the precise instant when he felt his rear wheel lifting on that triangle of death jutting out from the locomotive’s prow, and he and the motorcycle went plunging down the embankment together.
Half way down it, something hard hit his head and the world went black.
He was chewing a mouthful of cinders when he opened his eyes a few minutes later. Duncan and the Governor were on their knees beside him, and many others were crowding behind them.
“We got them, trooper, thanks to you!” Wendover said. “Got all three of them — and the baby — without firing a shot.”
Bradley sat up. His head hurt like sin, but nothing seemed to be broken. Duncan seized his hand, tried to say something and couldn’t. A man in overalls then bent over him.
“I’m the engineer, trooper,” he said. “I wanted to tell yuh that when I see that red light, first off, I—”
Bradley spat out some cinders.
“Well, anyway,” he said, “it’s a green light now!”
The Headless Idol