Incredibly, crazed though the man's voice was, Clancy believed him.
"What do you mean?" she demanded.
"We just want a little time, Carey and me. We want you to promise to keep your mouth shut for a week or so; that's all. Your word'll be good with us."
Again Clancy believed him. But now she was able to reason. She believed Garland, because he meant what he said. But—would he mean what he said five minutes from now? And, then, it didn't matter to her whether or not the man would mean it five years from now. He was attempting to dictate to her, Clancy Deane, who was on her way to meet Philip Vandervent, she who had received flowers from Philip Vandervent only yesterday.
Vandervent was a gentleman. Would he temporize? Would he give a promise that in honor he should not give?
Where there had been only suspicion, there was now certainty. She knew that Don Carey had killed Morris Beiner. On some remote day, she would ponder on the queer ways of fate, on the strange coincidences that make for what we call "inevitability." With, so far as she knew, no evidence against him, Don Carey had convicted himself.
He was a murderer. By all possible implication, Carey had confessed, and Garland had corroborated the confession. And they asked her to become party to a murder!
She would never again be as angry as she was now. It seemed to her inflamed senses that they were insulting not merely herself but Vandervent also. They were suggesting that she was venal, capable of putting bodily safety above honesty. And, in belittling her, they belittled the man who had, of all the women in the world, selected her. For now, in the stress of the moment, it was as though Vandervent's flowers had been a proposal. She fought not merely for herself, but, by some queer quirk of reasoning, for the man that she loved.
Her left hand held whip and reins. She dropped the reins, she rose to her feet and lashed savagely at Garland's head. She heard him scream as the knotted leather cut across his face. She saw him stagger back, relinquishing his hold of the bridle. She turned. Carey's two hands sought for her; his face was but a yard away, and into it she drove the butt of the whip. He, too, reeled back.
Her hand went above her head and the lash descended, swishingly, upon the side of the horse. There was a jerk forward that sat her heavily down upon the seat. A sidewise twist, as the animal leaped ahead, almost threw her out of the sleigh. She gripped at the dashboard and managed to right herself. And then the sleigh went round a bend in the road.