"I don't think I will," Eve cheerfully replied, rising. "And I don't in
the least mind being alarmed. I'm coming along."
With a formal bow of consent, Lanyard folded the wrap round her
shoulders, then threw his coat over his arm and prepared to follow the
waiter. But the latter was just then peremptorily hailed by the host of
the remaining party with a demand for "the check"; so Lanyard and Eve
proceeded to the little office unescorted, to find awaiting them a
person of decent manners with an intelligent if at the moment somewhat
harassed eye. There had been, he began, an unfortunate accident, he
was more sorry than he could say that it had occurred in his
establishment . . .
"What sort of an accident?" Lanyard with a touch of asperity cut his
apologies short.
"If you and your lady don't mind stepping this way, I'll show you . . ."
Ushered out to the night, they were conducted round the corner of the
building to the space where, in the chilly glimmer of a belated moon,
the brougham stood parked with one other motor-car, and, near the
former, two men were stooping over something that rested motionless upon
the packed earth, one of them focussing upon it the beam of an electric
torch.
Lanyard touched Eve's arm, recommending her to wait aside, and with the
manager joined the group round the supine body of Eve's chauffeur.
The man lay in a limp sprawl, his face in that uncompromising glare a
congested crimson, mouth slack and drooling, half-closed lids showing
only the whites of eyes rolled back, stertorous respiration fouling the
sweet smell of the night--evidently no worse than dead drunk.
"I just don't know how he worked it to get like this," the manager was
protesting. "It's dead against our rules to sell hootch to chauffeurs,
and I'll sack the bird responsible for this if I have to bounce the
whole staff to get rid of him. But that isn't any comfort to you, I
guess."
"None," Lanyard curtly agreed.
"He was all right as long's he was sittin' in the chowfers'
dinin'-room," the man with the lamp volunteered--"you wouldn't have
thought he'd had more'n a couple. But as soon as the cold air hit him he
flopped like somebody'd crowned him. Funny . . ."
"No doubt you find it so."
"The only thing I can suggest, Mr. Martin," the manager put in, Lanyard
thought too eagerly, "is to lend you somebody to drive you back to New
York. Arthur here's a darn' good driver, knows all the roads like a
book."
"That's very good of you," Lanyard returned, with a warning eye for Eve.
"We'll be glad to make it worth Arthur's while, for neither of us can
drive or has even a general idea of the roads. But first"--the toe of
his boot stirred the body--"we would like to be sure this poor fool will
get proper attention. I daresay you can give him a room."
"Of course, sir--and I'll 'phone for a doctor, if you say so, though I
don't think that ought to be necessary. This isn't any case of
wood-alcohol poisoning, there isn't a drop of bad liquor in the house--"
"I'm sure there isn't. All the same, what he had must have been wicked
stuff. If you don't mind having him carried indoors, I'll make an
examination myself--I have a limited amount of medical knowledge."
"You bet I will . . ."
Directed by the speaker, the two underlings, with no noteworthy
enthusiasm, surrendered the torch and their leisure, lifted the body of
the drunkard by the legs and shoulders and, staggering with the weight
of that inert lump, made crabwise progress toward the rear entrance to
the inn, the manager following with the light while Lanyard turned back
to Eve with a suggestion clearly articulated for the benefit of whatever
ears might care to hear.
"If you'll make yourself comfortable in the car, I promise I won't keep
you waiting long."
"Thank you," Eve equably returned. "I don't mind waiting, and I do want
to be sure that poor boy is in no real danger."
Lanyard offered Eve a hand, but the door he unlatched was one that
admitted not to the car but to the front seat of the driver's right.
"Quick!" he urged in an undertone, and when Eve was in place doubled
round to the other side of the brougham.
But the manager was not napping. "Here now!" he remonstrated, jolted out
of his vocational urbanity, and came running back--"thought you said you
couldn't--"
The moonlight silvered something In his hand which might or might not
have been the darkened torch, and which Lanyard could not afford to give
the benefit of the doubt. Standing on the running-board, without the
smallest compunction he planted a foot in the midriff of the man so
forcibly that the latter dropped whatever it was he had been holding
and, with a yelp, doubled up.
Immediately settling into place behind the wheel, Lanyard released the
emergency brake, with the result that the brougham, standing on a slight
down-grade, began to move of its own weight even before he could locate
the starting pedal. Muttering a prayer of thankfulness, he meshed the
gears in third and swung the car into the down-hill road. At the same
time the two who had been carrying the chauffeur let their senseless
burden drop and started in pursuit. One tripped over some inequality in
the ground and plunged to his knees. The other gained the running-board
in a bound and aimed a blow at Lanyard's head. It went wide, and
Lanyard's fist glanced upon the fellow's jaw with sufficient weight to
dislodge him. Beating the air with frantic arms, he disappeared.
Fumbling for the switch with one hand, with the other Lanyard steered
for the maw of the road through the woods. For one more instant the inn,
painted with pale lunar phosphorescence, stood out in bold relief
against its background of blurred forest, while with the tail of his eye
Lanyard saw its front door of a sudden release a stream of saffron
light. Somebody shouted in profane astonishment, somebody stumbled out
upon the veranda and pelted toward the parking space. Then, between two
heartbeats, Lanyard solved the secret of headlights and ignition, and
the brougham, momentum sharply hastened, swept on into the pillared
tunnel through the pines.
At first, hands that hadn't grasped a wheel in years had all they could
do to hold the lurching fabric to a sharply declivitous and twisting
path. Then the grade grew more moderate, the way less tortuous, and the
car, obedient to its brakes, slipped gently past the fiery sign and
turned its nose southwards on the highway.
"Well done!" Eve applauded--"Oh, well done!"
"Wait!" Lanyard prayed, with the man in mind who had sprinted from the
lighted doorway toward the other car--"physical fact to the contrary
notwithstanding, we're not out of the woods yet."
His toe found the accelerator pedal, the motor responded with a
mettlesome snort and a drumming drone that waxed apace, the car clove
the night like a frightened cat . . .
After a mile or so of fast going on a road whose wendings required for
safe navigation a sure hand and eye, Lanyard felt confidence confirmed
in his ability to handle the brougham with fair skill and extract from
its motor the best it had to give. And when, before long, a rarely long
stretch of straight road made a fair trial feasible, he coaxed the
speedometer by degrees up to, then past the mark 50, without feeling
that he was tempting fate.
Toward the end of that dash, Eve, who had been keeping an eye on the
road astern, reported it bare of pursuing headlights.
"Do you mean to try for that railroad?"
"No--not now, not since things have turned out as they have."
"I am glad," she told him coolly. "This night is too lovely to be
spoiled by travelling in a stuffy train."
"Is it?" he queried in grim humour.
"Do you not find it so, my Michael?"
"I find it damnably dangerous."
"And I find it, danger and all, divine."
But Lanyard drove in an obsession of fatality . . . The road, a river of
oxidized silver threading an upland world of purples and blacks in
blended masses and ever and again opening up vistas of long valleys
filled with mist like streams of milk, was a gauntlet of deadly perils.
In the blue bowl of the sky it bleached the misshapen moon like a
grinning devil-mask swung from side to side of the devious way. The vast
stillness that dwelt upon the world beneath had a brooding effect as of
beauty holding its breath in dread. Through that somehow abnormal hush
the swaying bulk of the brougham bored like something wild of eye and
mad with fear. The wind its flight created had an insane whine, and the
incessant drum of its exhaust, echoing from hard smooth surfaces, was
re-echoed by hills and woods and fields with a rumour as of tom-toms
thrumming a bacchanal of death . . .
But to the woman who loved Lanyard it was all divine . . .
Summing up another survey of the road behind, she declared: "There is
nothing. You have outwitted and distanced them."
"Have I?"
"Is there more to fear?"
"But everything."
"Even an open road?"
"Who can say what may lie in wait for us round the next bend?"
"What does it matter, so we go to meet it together?"
Neither daring to take his eyes from the streaming road nor knowing how
to answer her, Lanyard gave only a groan.
"I fear nothing but to be parted from you. Promise we shall never part."
He could not promise . . .
"Michael!" the heartbreaking voice at his shoulder insisted--"why don't
you answer me? Surely you can't still be thinking I will ever let you
go?"