He called the chief at temporary headquarters, and got no answer. There wasn’t any answer because MacMurdie and the chief were at that moment taking off from Yacht Harbor. And Josh Newton, at headquarters, had not yet been familiarized with the secret radio code. But Smitty didn’t know that.
He put the transmitting set back in the condition in which he had found it, and started toward the broken-plank door.
He stopped just short of it and listened hard.
Out on the lake, somewhere near, was sounding the smooth roar of a marine motor. And about two seconds were enough to tell that it was heading rapidly this way.
Smitty had prowled the bears’ den unmolested — but now the bears were coming home.
He jumped to the entrance, splashing in the breast-high water, as light-footed as a sixteen-year-old stripling, for all his giant bulk. But he saw at a glance that he was too late. He couldn’t get out of the ferry’s hull now without being seen.
Only a few hundred yards away, and skimming fast, was a large motor cruiser, with riding lights gleaming like jewels in the gathering dusk. But Smitty didn’t pay any attention to the pretty lights. He was staring at the cruiser’s deck.
He saw at least a half dozen men there, and in addition got a glimpse of a head bobbing down a hatch aft.
The giant paddled back away from the door. It was all he could do. He couldn’t get out. The best remaining course was to try to hide somewhere till he had a chance to slip away unobserved.
He chose the drums of gasoline as a convenient barricade, and slipped behind them. He barely made it when he heard the cruiser stop outside, then grind forward again at low speed and under a load.
The load, he saw, from between two close-placed drums, was the swinging weight of one of the great doors at the end of the ferry. The cruiser’s nose had been bunted against the left-hand one, and was pushing it inward. Smitty guessed that when the diesel generator was functioning it worked the big doors on motors. When it was off, the doors had to be opened like this.
The cruiser crept in till the prow grated on the ferry’s bottom timbers, which was at a point just far enough inside for the door to be closed again.
But the men on the boat didn’t close the door. They left it open, and began swarming off the cruiser.
Smitty’s brow wrinkled in disgust at the lousiness of his luck. There were even more than he’d thought. Eleven men came off the cruiser. Eleven were too many for even the giant Smitty to handle, particularly since each, of course, would be fully armed.
The last two to come off the boat carried something.
And with the first glimpse of it, Smitty’s eyes narrowed dangerously. The thing the two carried was a bundle about five feet long wrapped in sailcloth. But it was a bundle that kicked and squirmed till it was all the two men could do to handle it, in spite of the sailcloth which was used as a sort of straitjacket.
From the kicking end of the bundle two silk-sheathed legs suddenly burst free of the clogging heavy cloth. Small feet clad in high-heeled shoes were vicious twin blurs as they sought earnestly to make connection with something.
It was a girl! The gang had added kidnapping to its activities.
Smitty growled deep in his throat like an enraged bull elephant. But he stayed behind the drums. The odds were too hopeless. He could serve the girl best by waiting and trying at a later, safer time to take her away from here.
Then, with an oath, one of the two men dropped the wriggling bundle so that it splashed in knee-deep water.
“She’s a wildcat!” Smitty heard him snarl. “I think we ought to smack her with a wrench and have it over with, once and for all.”
“Not till we find out from her how much the white-headed guy knows,” the second man said. Then he cursed, too, as the dropped bundle freed itself from the clogging cloth, and a girl with her skirt ripped and her blouse in shreds seemed to soar right at his face like an enraged, leaping lynx.
Behind the gas drums Smitty hunched great shoulders in an unreasoning urge for action no matter how hopeless the odds. For the girl was Nellie Gray!
Pink-and-white, dainty, fragile looking as a Dresden doll, Nellie seemed even more softly helpless and feminine than usual with her slim body shielded only by shreds of blouse and a tattered skirt. But so does dynamite look harmless in a slim round stick.
One of the men, lunging for her, suddenly found himself splashing flat on his face in the dirty water beside her. The second felt tapering small fingers briefly clamp on his wrist, felt himself whirled a little sideways, and then fell with awkward splash over the first man.
“You dummies!” raged one of the men who had gone toward the machine shop from the boat. “Get her! Quick! Before she can start that boat!”
Like a sleek-legged wraith, Nellie was at the boat and raising herself toward the deck. But they got her! Two more men caught her slim ankles before she could draw them out of reach. The two in the water, furious at her and at themselves, reinforced them. They hauled her down with brutal force.
And then two oil drums near the port side of the ferry’s hull banged apart and an infuriated giant sprang from between them.
No matter what the odds, or how illogical it was to tackle them, Smitty couldn’t stand to see Nellie Gray knocked around like that.
Men yelled and ran for him! Others shot at him! But with only the lights of the cruiser for illumination, the interior of the vast hull was very dim; and Smitty was only a gigantic shadow charging toward the struggling group. So no bullet hit home.
The four saw him coming, and one of them swung on Nellie while two others were holding her arms. It was a man’s blow, catching her full on one satiny cheek. She slumped in their grasp — and Smitty proceeded to go completely crazy.
He got the man who had slugged her, with one great hand on a shoulder and the other on a thigh. He raised his struggling body almost at arm’s length above his head, turned and threw him bodily at the other men who were rushing to get at him.
The man catapulting through the air hit the first two men and bowled them over. But he hit them dead! Two slugs intended for Smitty tore through the thrown man’s body.
The three remaining by Nellie’s side were climbing up Smitty’s tall frame like three boys hugging a tree trunk. But suddenly the three were one! Smitty’s gigantic paws had grabbed two men by their necks and cracked their heads together. They fell like broken twigs, and one was destined never to get up again.
The rest were on the big man, now, no longer trying to shoot because of the darkness and the danger of shooting each other. A thrown wrench sailed toward Smitty’s head. He blocked it with a massive arm, stooped to pick it up.
Two men leaped to his back, pounding with clubbed guns at his skull. He heaved them off with a sudden upright lurch, and began swinging the wrench.
A man staggered back with a broken collar-bone. Another sagged with a crease in the bone of his skull over his left ear. A third screamed and pressed his hands over the place where a face had been. The others callously stepped over his body and came on.
It was a battle between pygmies and a giant. But there were too many pygmies!
A slashing gun barrel found his head, and he staggered. Another got him and he went ponderously to his knees. His feeling hands got the calf of a leg. He squeezed, and the owner of the leg shrieked with the agony of pulped muscles that would keep him off his feet for at least a month.
But that was the last. They were all over him. And then he was down — and out.