A ROPE OR SOMETHING.
As they reached the level of the moor and the Drovers' Track, to join
which ancient road their path stretched on for yet a mile, they turned,
moved by a common impulse, to look down on the green hollow which had
been the nest of so great a happiness.
"Emerald, you said, Amaryllis?"
"And blue, Dick, from the sky."
When they had tramped a half-mile or more in silence which seemed to
Amaryllis very close communion, Dick spoke; for already he was feeling
the stones of the world beneath their feet.
"We put our money on the wrong horse, dear. They didn't suspect--they
knew. And they're near us," he said.
"I don't care. If they kill me now, Dick, I don't care."
He agreed--nodding more sympathetically, she thought, than any man
before him had ever nodded.
But after another silence, he said:
"And yet that makes it all the more necessary to come out top dog this
time. Where d'you think they are?"
"If the Drovers' Track's good enough for a car," she answered, "I should
guess--after all, it's all guessing, isn't it?--I should guess that they
turned off the road at the hawthorns and the white stone, and drove
straight on to Harthborough."
"They've had time to go and come back," said Dick. "If we had food with
us, we might hide all night on the moor. But you'd be ill by the
morning."
"Let's go on," said Amaryllis.
"You lead me to luck," he answered, "so what you say goes. A train's the
safest place for us, and, if Melchard's seen his picket there after
driving right over this ground, he won't be expecting to find us on the
way back."
"He may be between us and Harthborough now," said Amaryllis.
"If we can pass him, then," said Dick, "his Harthborough picket won't
give us much trouble. Our other way is the London road. There we might
run into Melchard plus his picket. The railway's at Harthborough, so
Harthborough's got it."
"And here," said the girl, "is the Drovers' Track."
Before they knew it, they had stepped into a way wider and more clearly
marked than the path which had brought them across the base of the
triangle of which the apex was the white stone by the hawthorns they had
never seen.
"It's a derelict Roman road," said Dick, as they walked along it towards
the cleft in the ridge. "See the small paving stones--here--there--and
you can feel 'em through the turf, here at the side. Most of this grass
has come since the railways took the cattle and the goods wagons off the
road. If the track is as good as this all the way----"
"What's that?" exclaimed Amaryllis, stopping and listening.
They were not more than three hundred yards from the point where the
road began to rise from the broad, level space of the moor spreading on
both sides of the old paved causeway in firm, close-nibbled grass,
interspersed with tufts of ling and heather, varied by rarer clumps of
gorse.
Not within a hundred yards in any direction could Dick find possible
cover from eyes descending the Bull's Neck.
The pair stood motionless, their hearts in their ears.
What they heard was unmistakable.
"A motor," said Amaryllis. "It's coming down."
She laid a hand on his shoulder, lifting her face to him.
When he raised his own from it, it was to watch the point where the
descending road took its last bend in the passage by which it had
traversed the ridge: the point where the approaching car must appear.
With flushed face and unflinching eyes, Amaryllis stood beside her
lover, her right hand still lying light on his shoulder, her sun-bonnet
fallen back, and the beauty of hair and features open to the coming
enemy.
As the blue car pushed its nose round the corner, and, turning, made
straight for the lower plateau, she glanced at Dick's face once more; to
see there an impersonal serenity which she might have found inhuman, had
she been a mere spectator of the drama which was coming. Being, however,
one of its persons, she felt herself enwrapped, and uplifted from fear
by the consciousness that a calm mind and a swift brain were supporting
each other in her service.
In her soul she cried already, not _Nous les aurons_, but _Il les a_.
"They'll see us," said Dick. "When I say 'run!' make for that
gorse-bush. I'll be behind, overdoing my limp. When I say 'down!'
fall--sprained ankle. I try to pull you up. You grip your ankle and
yell. They'll be out of the car and after us. When they're close, I
shall bolt across the road. Yell out 'don't leave me.' They won't touch
you--they're after me--I've got the stuff. When they're well away, get
back to the car. Get in. Can you drive her?"
"Yes, it's a Seely-Thompson."
"Get her round, head to the rise, ready to pick me up. Got it?"
"Yes," said Amaryllis.
From the car came a queer animal cry. The machine shot suddenly forward.
Deceived by the immobility of the waiting pair, the driver had increased
his pace.
"Run!" said Dick, and Amaryllis leapt the ditch at the roadside and ran
in the direction he had given. He followed clumsily, exaggerating his
lameness.
The car shot by them, as they ran obliquely in the opposite direction,
so adding, before the driver could pull up, a hundred yards to their
start.
It was, therefore, not until Amaryllis was at the rise of the ridge that
they heard behind them the two pairs of feet in pursuit.
"Down!" said Dick, close behind her; and with a well simulated shriek of
pain, the girl fell in a heap.
"Oh, my foot!" she cried.
Dick's chief fear was that shooting should begin too soon.
But he heard Melchard's high voice shouting angrily to Mut-mut in his
own tongue.
"Jagun pakai snapong. Brenkali akau mow pukul sama prempuan."
And Dick smiled, turning his head in time to see Mut-mut tuck away his
revolver.
He leaned over Amaryllis, with pretence of trying to pull her to her
feet.
"All right. It works. He's telling Crop-ear not to shoot, 'fear of
hitting you."
Amaryllis pushed his hands away, clutched her ankle and moaned aloud.
Dick turned from her and, at a better pace than before, hobbled across
the road, pursued by entreaties from Amaryllis so agonized and lifelike
as almost to deceive the very author of the scheme.
As he began, with increased appearance of lameness to labour up the
slope, he once more heard Melchard's voice:
"Jagun pakai snapong, kalau dea ta mow lepas. Kita mow dapat."
Labouring still more, Dick glanced behind him and saw the two pursuers
straining every nerve to overtake him, and for the moment giving no
thought to Amaryllis.
Something more Melchard said, but this time Dick could not catch the
order. Mut-mut, however, interpreted, by altering his course and running
along the foot of the ridge towards a place where the ascent appeared
less steep. By this, it seemed, he intended to cut across Dick's line of
flight, and to drive him back upon Melchard.
Melchard, meantime, was toiling up the slope in Dick's footsteps with a
determination unexpected in a man of his appearance and mode of life.
On the other side of the ancient causeway, at the very foot of the
slope, Amaryllis, full of courage and calculation, but with a heart
beating painfully until her moment for action should come.
This, she had resolved, must be the moment when she should lose sight of
the last runner; and by turning her head sideways, though never raising
it, she could see that Dick had the same idea; for he had so directed
his flight that he and Melchard were soon hidden from her, while the
lumbering Mut-mut, wasting huge force, it seemed, upon each short
stride, pounding along the lower ground, vanished only when, reaching
his chosen line of ascent, he began to mount the hill.
Then Amaryllis rose, lifted the voluminous skirt, tucked the hem into
the waistband, and ran, with long flashes of grey stocking, for the
abandoned car.
Dick, still leading his enemies on, saw her in one of his calculating
looks behind him. And his heart leapt into his throat for pride of the
woman that could listen to, comprehend and interpret orders--and carry
them out with a stride like that.
He prolonged his backward look, and Melchard, below him, observed that
it was directed over his head, and turned his eyes in the same
direction.
He saw the girl running, pulled a weapon from his hip and tried a long
shot.
The crack of the Browning had hardly reached her ears before Amaryllis
was in the driving-seat. But not for a flicker did she turn her eyes
from the business of the moment.
Melchard, with his left hand on his hip and the barrel of the automatic
resting on the upturned elbow close to his chin, was on the point of
firing again at the very moment when Mut-mut, having reached the top of
the ridge, was running back to meet Dick, and Dick, coming down the
slope at the best of his prodigious though uneven stride, was within two
paces of Melchard's back.
At the sound of his rushing approach, and in the very act of firing,
Melchard started. The shot went wide, and the man turned himself and his
weapon on the enemy that was nearer even than he guessed.
In the very moment of wheeling about, he received a rugger hand-off on
his right jaw, which launched him many yards, sideways down the slope,
to land and turn literally heels over head as he fell.
His pistol fell more slowly and further, after describing a wavering arc
over his head.
And then Dick Bellamy ran; ran as he had not run since he broke the tape
in a certain sprint of four hundred metres at Buenos Ayres, in forty
nine and a quarter seconds. But that was when his legs were an equal
pair.
Amaryllis saw it all; Mut-mut on the sky-line of the ridge, hesitating;
Melchard and his pistol in eccentric parabolas; Dick, with a wisp of
black hair over his wounded cheek, "flying," she called it, down the
last of the slope, and crossing the level ground to her and the car; a
wild man running, she thought, with the pace of a racehorse, and the
movement, not of a runaway, but of a winner. "And, oh!" she would say to
him afterwards, "your funny eyes! How they blazed!"
Within four strides of the car.
"Let her rip," he grunted, and taking the low door of the tonneau in his
stride, landed on the back seat.
The car rushed forward.
Dick looked round him. Melchard was on his feet, bent and searching the
long grass and scrub of the lower slope.
"The beast's got some guts," muttered Dick.
Melchard stood erect and began to run towards them, slowly and
painfully.
"He's found his gun," said Dick.
A raised arm and a sharp crack proved his words.
"Throw in the top speed," said Dick. "We _must_ go through the Bull's
Neck. No cover the other way."
He looked up at the ridge. Mut-mut was not there nor anywhere in sight.