With a yell, Colt threw back both clawing hands, instinctively, to fend off this unseen and agonizing Horror.
It is not well to abandon the wheel of a light touring car, just as one is driving around a right-angle pitch in an uneven road, by night;—the less so if the gully-sides of a steep coulée are within six inches of one’s left wheel.
The left tire struck glancingly against a wayside bowlder. The impact twisted both front wheels sharply to the left. There was no hand at the wheel to correct the wrenching shift of direction.
Obliquely, the machine shot over the edge of the coulée and down its abrupt side. Ten feet farther on, the fender smote a scrub-tree. The tree was smashed. The speeding car turned turtle.
Before Fraser Colt was well aware of what had happened, the down-plunging car came to a jarring stop, then rose in air and fell on him, pinioning him beneath it. Treve was flung clear of the car and landed in a scratchy mass of greasewood. Beyond a bruise or so, both he and Colt were unhurt.
The man had been caught in the front seat-well of the topless little car; alongside and under the steering wheel. One side-door was jammed irremediably shut. The other had been knocked clean off. Through the aperture thus left, Colt began to squeeze his rotund bulk, to reach firm ground and to get free of the imprisoning car. But, as his head protruded, turtle-like, from its shell, something whizzed at it through the darkness; and two sets of teeth raked the fat face in a laudable effort to tear it off.
Back shrank Fraser Colt, screeching. Blocking the outlet as best he could with the torn seat cushion, he cowered in his tiny prison; while outside ravened and snarled the great dog who hated him.
Colt fumbled for his pistol. Somehow, in the course of the wholesale spill, it had fallen out of his pocket. Once he reached out a tentatively feeling hand from behind the leathern barrier of cushion. Swiftly as he yanked it back, Treve’s raking teeth were a fraction of a second swifter.
Around and around his barricaded foe whirled the roaring collie. Then, failing to get at or dislodge the man, Treve accepted the situation. He lay down at full length, alongside the car, as close as possible to the blocked aperture behind which the cramped and bleeding Colt was huddled.