The motor boat! It seemed like a
God-given piece of luck that he had noticed it was like his own; there
would be no blind, and that meant fatal, blunders in the dark over its
mechanism, and he could start it up in a moment--just the time to cast
her off, that was all he needed.
The shouts swelled behind him. Jimmie Dale was running for his life. He
flung a glance backward. One form--Mittel, he was certain--was perhaps a
hundred yards in the rear. The others were just emerging from the
French windows--grotesque, leaping things they looked, in the light that
streamed out behind them from the room.
Jimmie Dale's feet pounded the planking of the wharf. He stooped and
snatched at the mooring line. Mittel was almost at the wharf. It seemed
an age, a year to Jimmie Dale before the line was clear. Shouts rang
still louder across the lawn--the police, racing in a pack, were more
than halfway from the house. He flung the line into the boat, sprang in
after it--and Mittel, looming over him, grasped at the boat's gunwhale.
Both men were panting from their exertions.
"Let go!" snarled Jimmie Dale between clenched teeth.
Mittel's answer was a hoarse, gasping shout to the police to hurry--and
then Mittel reeled back, measuring his length upon the wharf from a blow
with a boat hook full across the face, driven with a sudden, untamed
savagery that seemed for the moment to have mastered Jimmie Dale.
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