"You saw that carriage that just rushed by down towards the harbour?"
"Sí, señor," grinned the driver.
"Then after it like blue hades, and there's a hundred pesetas for you when we're alongside."
"Ah, señores, muchos grac——"
"Drive, you scoundrel; don't talk."
Away we went again, clattering, jolting, rattling, till the teeth of us were fairly loosened in their steps. Sharp to the right it was, past the Longa, and on by the tram-lines alongside the old walls; then an S-turn; and then a sweep round to the left; always with the tram-lines beside our tires. We were heading out for the white suburb which is beneath the Bellver Castle, and what harbourage the fugitives could hope to find in that direction we couldn't for the life of us imagine. But that was their affair. Our business—or the business we made for ourselves—was to get within speaking range.
Up the hill we spun, and through the pretty suburb, with its orange-trees, and its tattered palms, and its sprawling clumps of prickly pears; and past Porto Pi, the silted-up Carthaginian harbour; and then, leaving population and tram-lines behind, we opened out on to the magnificent road that sweeps round the western horn of Palma Bay. But always at a fixed distance in front of us hovered a billowing halo of amber-coloured dust, which no frenzied strain on our part could bring a metre nearer.
Once where the road wound in stately zigzags down the cliff of a slope, our driver took the ditch and cut an angle, heading across the rough ground which intervened; but the pace had to be lessened, and the carriage was nearly wrenched to pieces, and the experiment was not repeated. We had lost time by it.
And so the race continued, and the monotony of it dulled our interest in surroundings.
We thought only of the conclusion. Where the actual winning-post could be we had given up trying to conjecture. "It seems," Haigh remarked once, "that those two fools have made up their minds to race round this five-franc bit of an island for so long as we three fools choose to chivy them. It's a mad set-out whichever side you take it from, and the fun's evaporating. I don't know what you chaps are going to do, but the next chance I see I'm going to get down for a drink. I'm parched within an inch of dissolution."