"Ah, no, no! Michael, you couldn't hurt me so."
"Is not tonight enough to prove to you no man who loved you truly could
consent to expose you to such a life? It is my fate to love you too
well . . ."
What the woman said to that was lost in the blast of a tyre blown out on
one of the front wheels. An instantaneous swerve toward a ditch by the
roadside all but wrenched the wheel out of control and resulted in a
wreck. As it was, frantic work averted that disaster by the slenderest
of scrapes. With locked brakes the brougham skidded drunkenly and rolled
to a halt broadside to a bluff over across from the ditch.
With amazing self-command, Lanyard suffered never a syllable of a
seething vocabulary to escape his lips as he unlatched the door and
leaped down. An instant later Eve on her side alighted and came round to
join him. Together, they contemplated in silence the ruptured tyre and
the two good spares locked in their rack--and the key in the pocket of a
chauffeur sleeping off his drink in the Inn of the Green Woods, fifteen
miles or more away!
From contemplation of this bad business, Lanyard turned to consider
their position, and found it equally bad. The car stood, as far off the
road as it could be, but nevertheless somewhat blocking its narrow
width, on the waist of an S bend, with a hillside blinding the approach
on one hand, a wilderness of young forest on the other. And even as the
thought formed that it would be well to move on at once, headlights
illuminated the curve ahead, then swung into view, and a car coming from
the direction of New York bore down at nothing less than forty miles an
hour.
Lanyard had barely time to catch Eve by the arm and drag her out of its
path, a maneuvre which took them both to the side of the road bordered
by the ditch. Simultaneously the bellow of an unmuffled exhaust told of
the approach of another car from the opposite direction. When Lanyard
first saw it, it was less than a hundred feet distant, moving at a
terrific rate--and running without lights!
So that was why Eve had been able to detect no sign of pursuit . . .
The first car, forced by the stationary brougham to sheer to the wrong
side of the road, loosed upon the night a blare of frenzy. Through this
penetrated Eve's wail of terror. Lanyard swung to her like a maniac,
seized the woman and, exerting every ounce of his strength, caught her
up bodily and flung her off the road, into the ditch.
Too late to save himself . . .
The moon, reeling in its blanched blue field, was a scimitar of white
flame. It swooped down through the firmament as might the wrath of God.
The world like a bomb exploded beneath his feet; a quivering mass of
agony, he was hurled far and far into an everlasting abyss of night
impenetrable . . .