"Ah, nonthenth, man! They're vulcanite!" snapped M'Cabe, more irascibly than ever.
The word nonsense was a disastrous effort, and I withdrew into the darkness to enjoy it.
"What colour might vulcanite be, sir?" murmured a voice beside me.
Jerry had joined the search-party; he lighted, as he spoke, an inch of candle. On hearing my explanation he remarked that it was a bad chance, and at the same instant the inch of candle slipped from his fingers and fell into a puddle.
"Divil mend ye for a candle! Have ye a match, sir? I haven't a one left!"
As it happened, I had no matches, my only means of making a light being a patent tinder-box.
"Have you a match there?" I called out to the invisible occupants of the car, which was about fifteen or twenty yards away, advancing towards it as I spoke. The constable politely jumped off and came to meet me.
As he was in the act of handing me his match-box, the car drove away down the hill.
I state the fact with the bald simplicity that is appropriate to great disaster. To be exact, the yellow mare sprang from inaction into a gallop, as if she had been stung by a wasp, and had a start of at least fifty yards before either the carman or the constable could get under weigh. The carman, uttering shrill and menacing whistles, led the chase, the constable, though badly hampered by his greatcoat, was a good second, and the Sergeant, making the best of a bad start, followed them into the night.
The yellow mare's head was for home, and her load was on its own legs on the road behind her; hysterical yelps from the dentist's dog indicated that he also was on his own legs, and was, in all human probability, jumping at the mare's nose. As the rapturous beat of her hoofs died away on the down-grade, I recalled the assertion that she had pulled the lungs out of two men, and it seemed to me that the prisoner had caught the psychological moment on the hop.