So I sallied forth, humming as I went. It was a sparkling afternoon of earliest spring, and as I paced the quiet streets I turned pleasantly over in that half-torpid brain of mine certain ideas as to the value of dramatic surprise, together with a carefully registered self-caution as to the author's over-use of the long arm of Coincidence.
Coincidences, I told myself, were things which popped up altogether too often on the printed page, and occurred altogether too seldom in actual life. It was a lazy man's way of reaching his end, that trick of riding the bumpers of Invention, of swinging and dangling from the over-wrenched arm-socket of Coincidence. It was good enough for the glib and delusive coggery of the moving-pictures, but—
And then I stopped short. I stopped short, confronted by one of those calamitous street-accidents only too common in any of our twentieth-century cities where speed and greed have come to weigh life so lightly.
I scarcely know which I noticed first, the spick-and-span cloverleaf roadster sparkling in its coat of Nile-green enamel, or the girl who seemed to step directly in its path as it went humming along the smooth and polished asphalt. But by one of those miraculously rapid calculations of which the human mind is quite often capable I realized that this same softly-humming car was predestined to come more or less violently into contact with that frail and seemingly hesitating figure.
My first impulse was to turn away, to avoid a spectacle which instinct told me would be horrible. For still again I felt the beak of cowardice spearing my vitals. I had the odynephobiac's dread of blood. It unmanned me; it sickened my soul. And I would at least have covered my face with my hands, to blot out the scene, had I not suddenly remembered that other and strangely similar occasion when a car came into violent collision with a human body. And it had been my car. On that occasion, I only too well knew, I had proved unpardonably vacillating and craven. I had run away from the horror I should have faced like a man. And I had paid for my cowardice, paid for it at the incredibly extortionate price of my self-respect and my peace of mind.
So this time I compelled myself to face the music. I steeled myself to stand by, even as the moving car struck the hesitating body and threw it to the pavement. My heart jumped up into my throat, like a ball-valve, and I shouted aloud, in mortal terror, for I could see where the skirted body trailed in under the running-gear of the Nile-green roadster, dragging along the pavement as the two white hands clung frantically to the green-painted spring-leaves. But I didn't run away. Instead of running away, in fact, I did exactly the opposite. I swung out to the side of the fallen girl, who stiffened in my arms as I picked her up. Then I spread my overcoat out along the curb, and placed the inert body on top of it, for in my first unreasoning panic I assumed that the woman was dead. I could see saliva streaked with blood drooling from her parted lips. It was horrible. And I had just made sure that she was still alive, that she was still breathing, when I became conscious of the fact that a second man, who had run along beside the car shaking his fist up at its driver, was standing close beside me. He was an elderly man, a venerable-looking man, a man with silvery hair and a meek and threadbare aspect. He was wringing his hands and moaning in his misery as he stared down at the girl stretched out on my overcoat.
"They've killed her!" he cried aloud. "O God, they've killed her!"
"Do you know this girl?" I demanded as I did my best to loosen the throat of her shirt-waist.
"Yes—yes! She's my Babbie. She's my niece. She's all I have," was his reply. "But they've killed her."
"Acting that way won't help things!" I told him, almost angrily. Then I looked up, still angrily, to see what had become of the Nile-green car. It had drawn in close beside the curb, not thirty feet away. I could see a woman stepping down from the driving-seat. All I noticed, at first, was that her face seemed very white, and that as she turned and moved toward us her left hand was pressed tight against her breast. It struck me, even in that moment of tension, as an indescribably dramatic gesture.