"I don't believe they would willingly have left the little girl lying there ill, to say nothing of leaving us in the lurch without a word," said I. "Ralph, there's something pretty devilish under this, or I'll eat my hat."
"Well, I should expect to see you devouring it, if—I hadn't heard Beechy's confess—if she hadn't told me some things," Ralph amended his sentence.
"I'm hanged if I won't give chase!" I exclaimed.
"How can you? You were saying at lunch that so far as you'd been able to fog it out, there wasn't more than the ghost of a road after Castelnuovo on to Cattaro; and it's to Cattaro one must go for the ancestral ruin."
"If there's a ghost of a road, it will do for me and this motor," I said. "What does it matter if we're both smashed, if only we get there first?"
"Men and motors don't get far when they're smashed. You'll have to wait till to-morrow morning, when we can all go flying down by the Austrian Lloyd, if the truants don't turn up in the meantime."
"Wait till to-morrow morning? My name isn't Terence Barrymore if I do that, or if I wait one minute longer than it will take me to go back where I came, and load up with petrol enough to see me through this job for good or evil."
"You'll start off at once, without finding out any more—and road or no road?"
"There's no more to find out this side of Cattaro, unless I'm far out of my reckoning; and if there's no road after Castelnuovo, I'll—I'll get through somehow, never fear."