“Where to, sir?”
Ned was properly cautious.
“The Grand Central Station,” he answered, intending then to change to another taxicab which could double on his tracks and take him on to the rendezvous in Newark.
The gentleman in evening clothes was hurrying towards Ned, signaling wildly for him to wait.
“Drive ahead!” called the boy to his chauffeur, and plunged into the black, cushioned depths of the big limousine. Ned kept right on going through, however, tore open the door on the opposite side, and was plunged headlong to the pavement by the sudden rush of the machine as it fairly leaped into high speed. There in the gloom of the car he had vaguely observed the uneasy stir of a man hidden beneath the heaped-up rugs in the corner.
The boy raced across the street, dodging whizzing motors and heedless of angrily-honking horns, sprang inside the nearest taxicab and yelled to the driver:
“Give her all the juice you can! Five dollars extra if you can get me to Brooklyn Bridge within twenty-five minutes!”
“I’ll do my darnedest,” the chauffeur, a grizzled man of fifty, assured him.
They were off in a jiffy, amid a grating of gear-shifts and thunderous explosions of the opened exhaust. The motor began to whine as the gas was fed more and more rapidly; the white glare of Broadway slipped past the cab windows in a dull blur. Traffic policemen’s whistles were merely unheeded incidentals of the mad race.
Peering back through the little window in the rear of the machine, Ned saw at least two other automobiles join in the pursuit from the front of the theatre. The big limousine was one of them. The stranger in evening clothes and another man were craning their necks out of the other.