A DIABOLICAL SHADOW HERALDS THE APPROACH OF MORPHEW, KING OF LOOT.
"I don't deserve such faith."
"But I don't consider you a good judge of your own worth, dear. And now that I understand the situation—you've made a fool and an enemy of this man Morphew, and he's conspiring to be revenged—tell me, what is it you have to propose about returning to Town?"
"I want you to let me find my way back alone. I have consulted road-maps and time-tables posted in the office here. There's a train for New York from the nearest station"—Lanyard glanced at the watch on his wrist—"in about half an hour. . . . Which reminds me, your driver is taking his time."
"Patience. He's always tinkering with the motor—he'll be ready any minute. You were saying—?"
"I want you to let me drop you at the railroad and take the train back to Town, with your chauffeur for protection, while I go on in the car."
Undisguised derision honoured this proposal. "But why should I, when it is you, not I, the Sultan of Loot is after? If the train can be considered safe, surely you're the one—"
"You forget, Morphew's people will aim at your motor-car, believing me to be in it whether I am or not. If I should succeed in leaving it unobserved, they would still pursue the car. You can't ask me to expose you to a danger from which I turn tail."
"Then why shouldn't we both take the train?"
"It is what you American call an accomodation—stops at every station. If we should abandon your car to be found near the railroad, it would be too simple to have the train anticipated by telephone, boarded somewhere between here and New York, and the two of us kept so closely watched we would have no chance . . ."
The woman's head described a sign of flat rejection——Lanyard's rueful recognition of an outcome foreseen.
"Impossible, my friend. I couldn't dream of leaving you to shift for yourself."
"But how else—?"
"I have a saner scheme. Why not stop here for the night? The inn must have accomodations. . . . You see!" Eve cried in laughing triumph—"you are trying to get rid of me when the truth is, you need me. Two heads are better than one . . . But why shake yours so dourly?"
"I am afraid of your plan for more reasons than one. Daylight for our return will hardly be the same thing as accident insurance. If you give me my choice, I like darkness better."
"And your other reasons—?"
"If I stop here overnight, where I am beyond much doubt under surveillance even now, I remain placed and give Morphew just so much more time to close his net round me. And nothing I know of makes this inn a sanctuary or guarantees the bona fides of the management."
"You don't mean to say you think the people who run this place—!"
"I have been taught to trust nobody at times like this. More than that, everybody knows most of these resorts in and about New York that openly flout the Prohibition Amendment are actively in league with if not actually owned by bootlegging interests. I will breathe more comfortably, I promise you, when—and if—we are permitted to go our way unhindered."
"Oh, but surely you exaggerate!"
"Possibly; it's not always a bad fault, by no means so bad as under-exaggeration when one's neck is concerned. However, it can't be long now before we know."
Seeing their waiter approach, Lanyard got up and took Eve's wrap from the back of her chair. But the natural expectation of word that the brougham was at the door suffered a blight even before the man spoke, by reason of the odd look with which he saluted Lanyard.
"Excuse me, Mr. Martin," he said with—or instinct was at fault—a tinge of mockery in his supple habit—"the manager's compliments, and he'd be much obliged if you'd step into the office a minute, he'd like to have a word with you."
"Indeed? What does the good man want?"
"If it's all the same to you, sir, it'd be better if you'd kindly talk with the boss."
"About what?"
"Well, sir," the waiter stammered—"I don't want to alarm the lady—something's happened."
Lanyard looked to Eve with lifting brows. "If you will excuse me—"
"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?"
He contrived to say, almost explosively: "But I must."
"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 . . .