Tom and Harry were carried on the shoulders of men, and moved along at a swift pace. Only half a dozen of the raiders needed to remain somewhat in the rear, firing an occasional shot to prevent the unarmed laborers from swarming to the attack.
“Hoist 'em up! Tie 'em on! Get under way quick! There'll be a big noise raised after us soon,” declared the same directing voice.
Tom and Harry were fairly thrown upon the backs of horses, and there lashed fast.
“Mount and get away,” ordered the commander of this strangest of night raids.
Two men, each leading a pony to which a captive was lashed, rode off in one direction. Groups of two or three rode away in other directions, the blackness of the night swallowing them up.
It was going to be a difficult task for pursuers to know which direction to take in order to come up with Reade and Hazelton in time to save them from the fate that lay just ahead of them!
For audacity and dash the raid could not have been better planned.
From camp not a shot was fired, for the watchmen had had the only weapons and these had been seized by the invaders.
“Our foremen might telegraph to camp,” thought Tom swiftly, as he felt himself being carried away. “But I'll wager that these smart scoundrels didn't forget to cut the wire before springing the raid.”
For the first two or three minutes Harry's, slower moving mind hardly grasped more than the fact that their enemies appeared to have won a complete triumph.
“There isn't much doubt as to what they'll do with us,” thought Hazelton, with a slight shudder. “These rascals will move too fast for pursuit to overtake them early. What they in intend to do with us can be done in a very few minutes.”
Neither young engineer really expected to live to see daylight. From the first, after having incurred the anger of a certain lawless element in Paloma, the young engineers had understood fully that threats of lynching them had not been idly made.
“There'll be a stir, though,” Tom Reade muttered to himself. “The A. G. & N. M. officials won't let this crime go by without a determined effort to bring the offenders to justice. Detectives will search this community in squads, and everyone of these masked gentlemen is likely to get his deserts.”