Rob's bluff worked to perfection. The waiting train pulled out the moment they had passed the siding switch, and went on its southward way without carrying a suspicion of anything having gone wrong. Rob got his tank full of water without trouble, and had hardly done so when Jo reappeared, hurrying towards the locomotive. He was followed by a boy bearing a basket full of cooked rice and Chinese cakes. The young officer had ordered the few employés of the station about with such a lordly air that they had obeyed him without question.
"Did they know we were coming?" asked Rob, as the engine again gathered headway.
"Yes," replied Jo. "They had received part of a message, telling them to look out for us. Then it was cut off, and they were a good deal troubled at not hearing a word from the south since."
"Good!" cried Rob. "We cut the wire just in time then."
"Yes. I told them I saw somebody destroying the line, and said I thought he was a Boxer."
"So I am," laughed Rob, munching a Chinese sweetcake as he spoke. "But how about the message to Pao-Ting?"
"Oh, he sent it off all right. That is, I suppose he did. Anyhow, he seemed a good deal impressed by the name I signed to it."
"What! The governor of Shan-Si! The big man of all the Boxers! You didn't have the cheek!"
"I did, though," declared Jo, stoutly; "and if it don't get us what we want at Pao-Ting, there isn't another name in all China that would."
They were barely out of sight of the station before they came to a bridge across a small river. Here, as the telegraph-line was strung on it within easy reach, the locomotive was brought to a stand-still, while Rob again tried his hand at wire-cutting. Jo leaned from the cab to watch him, thus relaxing for a minute his close watch of their useful prisoner.
As Rob came back, calling out: "Let her go again, I'm aboard," Jo turned to give the necessary order, only to discover to his consternation that the engine-driver was nowhere in sight. In vain did they search through the cab and its tender, in the water-tanks, and even under the coal. In vain did they look up and down the track, at the bridge on both sides, even staring down into the water twenty feet below them. The man had disappeared, so far as they could discover, as absolutely as though the ground had opened and swallowed him.