ON THE RIDGE ROAD
At the Westfall farm as the electric vanguard of the storm flashed
brightly over the valley, the telephone had tinkled. In considerable
distress of mind Aunt Agatha answered it.
"I--I'm sure I don't know when he will be home," she said helplessly
after a while. . . . "He went barely a minute ago and very foolish
too, I said, with the storm coming. . . . At dinner he spoke some of
going to the camp--Miss Westfall's camp. . . . I--I really don't know.
. . . I wish I did but I don't."
The lightning blazed at the window and left it black. Beyond in the
lane, a car with glaring headlights was rolling rapidly toward the
gateway. Aunt Agatha hung up with an aggrieved sniff.
Catching the reflection of the headlights she hurried to the window.
"Carl! Carl!" she called through the noise of wind and thunder.
The car came to a halt with a grinding shudder of brakes.
"Yes?" said Carl patiently. "What is it, Aunt Agatha?"
"Dick Sherrill phoned," said his aunt plaintively. "I thought you'd
gone. He wanted you to come up and play bridge. Oh, Carl, I--I do
wish you wouldn't motor about in a thunder shower. I once knew a
man--such a nice, quiet fellow too--and very domestic in his
habits--but he would ramble about and the lightning tore his collar off
and printed a picture of a tree on his spine. Think of that!"
Carl laughed. He was raincoated and hatless.
"An arboreal spine!" said he, rolling on. "Lord, Aunt Agatha, that was
tough! Moral--don't be domestic!"
"Carl!" quavered his aunt tearfully.
Again, throbbing like a giant heart in the darkness, the car halted.
Carl tossed his hair back from his forehead with a smothered groan, but
said nothing. He was always kinder and less impatient to Aunt Agatha
in a careless way than Diane.
"Will you take Diane an extra raincoat and rubbers?" appealed Aunt
Agatha pathetically. "Like as not the pockets of the other are full of
bugs and things."
"Aunt Agatha," grumbled Carl kindly, "why fuss so? Diane's equipped
with nerve and grit and independence enough to look out for herself."
Aunt Agatha sniffed and closed the window.
"I shan't worry!" she said flatly. "I shan't do it. If Carl comes
home with a tree on his spine, it's his own concern. Why _I_ should
have to endure all this, however, I can't for the life of me see. I've
one consolation anyway. A good part of my life's over. Death will be
a welcome relief after what _I've_ gone through!"
Shrugging as the window closed Carl drove on rapidly down the driveway.
It pleased him to ride madly with the wind and storm. The gale, laden
with dust and grit, bit and stung and tore rudely at his coat and hair.
The great lamps of the car flashed brilliantly ahead, revealing the
wind-beaten grasses by the wayside. Somewhere back in his mind there
was a troublesome stir of conscience. It had bothered him for days.
It had driven him irresistibly to-night at dinner to speak of visiting
his cousin's camp, though he bit his lip immediately afterward in a
flash of indecision. The turbulent night had seemed of a sort to think
things over. Moonlit fields and roads were enervating. Storm whipping
a man's blood into fire and energy--biting his brain into relentless
activity!--there was a thing for you.
Whiskey did not help. Last night it had treacherously magnified the
voice of conscience into a gibing roar.
Money! Money! The ray of the lamps ahead, the fork of the lightning,
the flickering gaslight there at the crossroads, they were all the
color of gold and like gold--of a flame that burned. Yes, he must have
money. No matter what the voice, he must have money.
At the crossroads he halted suddenly. To the south now lay his
cousin's camp, to the north the storm.
Perversely Carl wheeled about and drove to the north. A conscience was
a luxury for a rich man. Let the thing he had done, sired by the demon
of the bottle and mothered by the hell-pit of his flaming passions,
breed its own results.
It was a fitful nerve-straining task, waiting, and he had waited now
for weeks. Waiting had bred the Voice in his conscience, waiting had
bored insidious holes in his armor of flippant philosophy through which
had crept remorse and bitter self-contempt; once it had brought a
flaming resolve brutally to lay it all before his cousin and taunt her
with a crouching ghost buried for years in a candlestick.
Then there were nights like to-night when the ghastly hell-pit was
covered, and when to tell her squarely what the future held, without
taunt or apology, stirred him on to ardent resolution.
But alas! the last was but an intermittent witch-fire leading him
through the marsh after the elusive ghosts of finer things, to flicker
forlornly out at the end and abandon him in a pit of blackness and
mockery.
Very well, then; he would tell Diane of the yellowed paper; he would
tell her to-night. However he played the game there was gold at the
end.
He laughed suddenly and shrugged and swept erratically into a lighter
mood of impudence and daring. There was rain beating furiously in his
face and his hair was wet. Well, the car pounding along beneath him
had known many such nights of storm and wild adventure. It had pleased
him frequently to mock and gibe at death, with the wheel in his hand
and a song on his lips, and now wind and storm were tempting him to
ride with the devil.
So, dashing wildly through the whirl of dirt and wind, heavy with the
odor of burnt oil, he bent to the wheel, every nerve alert and leaping.
As the great car jumped to its limit of speed, he fell to singing an
elaborate sketch of opera in an insolent, dare-devil voice of splendid
timbre, the exhaust, unmuffled, pounding forth an obligato.
The lightning flared. It glittered wickedly upon the unlighted lamps
of a car rolling rapidly toward him. With a squirt of mud and a
scatter of flying pebbles, Carl swung far to the side of the road and
slammed on his brakes, skidding dangerously. The other car, heading
wildly to the left, went crashing headlong into a ditch from which a
man crawled, cursing viciously in a foreign tongue.
"You damned fool!" thundered Carl in a flash of temper. "Where are
your lights?"
The man did not reply.
Carl, whose normal instincts were friendly, sprang solicitously from
the car.
"I beg your pardon," said he carelessly. "Are you hurt?"
"No," said the other curtly.
"French," decided Carl, marking the European intonation. "Badly shaken
up, poor devil!--and not sure of his English. That accounts for his
peculiar silence. Monsieur," said he civilly in French. "I am not
prepared to deliver a homily upon wild driving, but it's well to drive
with lights when roads are dark and storm abroad."
"I have driven so few times," said the other coldly in excellent
English, "and the storm and erratic manner of your approach were
disquieting."
"_Touché_!" admitted Carl indifferently. "You have me there. Your
choice of a practice night, however," he added dryly, "was unique, to
say the least."
He crossed the road, frowned curiously down at the wrecked machine and
struck a match.
"_Voila_!" he exclaimed, staring aghast at the bent and splintered
mass, "_c'est magnifique, Monsieur_!'"
A sheet of flame shot suddenly from the match downward and wrapped the
wreck in fire. Conscious now of the fumes of leaking gasoline, Carl
leaped back.
"Monsieur," said he ruefully, and turned. The reflection of the
burning oil revealed Monsieur some feet away, running rapidly. Angered
by the man's unaccountable indifference, Carl leaped after him. He was
much the better runner of the two and presently swung his prisoner
about in a brutal grip and marched him savagely back to the blazing
car. Again there was an indefinable peculiarity about the manner of
the man's surrender.
"It is conventional, Monsieur," said Carl evenly, "to betray interest
and concern in the wreck of one's property. _Voila_! I have
effectively completed what you had begun. If I am not indifferent,
surely one may with reason look for a glimmer of concern from you."
Shrugging, the man stared sullenly at the car, a hopeless torch now
suffusing the lonely road with light. There was a certain suggestion
of racial subtlety in the careful immobility of his face, but his dark,
inscrutable eyes were blazing dangerously.
Carl's careless air of interest altered indefinably. Inspecting his
chafing prisoner now with narrowed, speculative eyes which glinted
keenly, he fell presently to whistling softly, laughed and with
tantalizing abruptness fell silent again. Immobile and subtle now as
his silent companion, he stared curiously at the other's fastidiously
pointed beard, at the dark eyes and tightly compressed lips, and
impudently proffered his cigarettes. They were impatiently declined.
"Monsieur is pleased," said Carl easily, "to reveal many marked
peculiarities of manner, owing to the unbalancing fact, I take it, that
his mind is relentlessly pursuing one channel. Monsieur," went on
Carl, lazily lighting his own cigarette and staring into his
companion's face with a look of level-eyed interest, "Monsieur has been
praying ardently for--opportunities, is it not so? 'I will humor this
mad fool who motors about in the rain like an operatic comet!' says
Monsieur inwardly, 'for I am, of course, a stranger to him. Then,
without arousing undue interest, I may presently escape into the storm
whence I came--er--driving atrociously.'"
The man stared.
"Monsieur," purred Carl audaciously, "is doubtless more interested
in--let us say--camp fires for instance, than such a vulgar blaze as
yonder car."
"One is powerless," returned the other haughtily, "to answer riddles."
Carl bowed with curiously graceful insolence.
"As if one could even hope to break such splendid nerve as that!" he
murmured appreciatively. "It is an impassiveness that comes only with
training. Monsieur," he added imperturbably, "I have had the
pleasure--of seeing you before."
"It is possible!" shrugged the other politely.
"Under strikingly different conditions!" pursued Carl reminiscently.
There was a disappointing lack of interest in the other's face.
"Even that is possible," assented the foreigner stiffly, "Environment
is a shifting circumstance of many colors. The honor of your
acquaintance, however, I fear is not mine."
Carl's eyes, dark and cold as agate, compelled attention.
"My name," said he deliberately, "is Granberry, Carl Westfall
Granberry."
The brief interval of silence was electric.
"It is a pity," said the other formally, "that the name is unfamiliar.
Monsieur Granberi, the storm increases. My ill-fated car, I take it,
requires no further attention." He stopped short, staring with
peculiar intentness at the road beyond. In the faint sputtering glow
of the embers by the wayside his face looked white and strained.
A slight smile dangerously edged the American's lips. With a careless
feint of glancing over his shoulder, he tightened every muscle and
leaped ahead. The violent impact of his body bore his victim, cursing,
to the ground.
"Ah!" said Carl wresting a revolver from the other's hand, "I thought
so! My friend, when you try a trick like that again, guard your hands
before you fall to staring. A fool might have turned--and been shot in
the back for his pains, eh? Monsieur," he murmured softly, pinioning
the other with his weight and smiling insolently, "we've a long ride
ahead of us. Privacy, I think, is essential to the perfect adjustment
of our future relations. There are one or two inexplicable features--"
The eyes of the other met his with a level glance of desperate
hostility.
With an undisciplined flash of temper, Carl brutally clubbed his
assailant into insensibility with the revolver butt and dragged him
heavily to the tonneau of his car, throbbing unheeded in the darkness.
Having assured himself of his guest's continued docility by the
sinister adjustment of a handkerchief, an indifferent rag or so from
the repair kit and a dirty rope, he covered the motionless figure
carelessly with a robe and sprang to the wheel, whistling softly. With
a throb, the great car leaped, humming, to the road.
At midnight the lights of Harlem lay ahead. The ride from the hills,
three hours of storm and squirting gravel, had been made with the
persistent whir and drone of a speeding engine. But once had it rested
black and silent in a lonely road of dripping trees, while the driver
hurried into a roadside tavern and telephoned.
Now, with a purring sigh as a bridge loomed ahead, the car slackened
and stopped. Carl slowly lighted a cigarette. At the end of the
bridge a straggler struck a match and flung it lightly in the river,
the disc of his cigar a fire-point in the shadows.
The car rolled on again and halted.
A stocky young man behind the fire-point emerged from the darkness and
climbed briskly into the tonneau.
"Hello, Hunch," said Carl.
"'Lo!" said Hunch and stared intently at the robe.
"Take a look at him," invited Carl carelessly. "It's not often you
have an opportunity of riding with one of his brand. He's in the
_Almanach de Gotha_."
"T'ell yuh say!" said Hunch largely, though the term had conveyed no
impression whatever to his democratic mind.
Cautiously raising the robe Hunch Dorrigan stared with interest at the
prisoner he was inconspicuously to assist into the empty town house of
the Westfalls.