In the night silence I could hear the smooth running of the other motor.
A second voice, a woman’s voice, said, “He’s around here someplace. He must have run out of petrol. He was right ahead of us.”
I kept stiffly silent under the freight car. The pair prowled around. I could see their shadows and occasionally get a glimpse of their legs. The man’s legs were stocky and muscular; the feminine voice went with a pair of legs that would have made a swell stocking ad, but her voice was hard.
The man said, “That’s the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen. He was right ahead of us, wasn’t he, Babe?”
“Yes. It must have been this car. He can’t have gone far. How about those freight cars?”
“Why the hell would he jump out of his automobile and crawl in a freight car?” the man asked irritably. “Naturally he’d do what anyone else does when he runs out of petrol. He’d have stood by the car and waited for someone to come along. When he saw our car coming he should have flagged us down and asked for help.”
“Well, he didn’t do what he should have done,” the woman said, and then added, “Guess why?”
“We weren’t close enough to him for him to get frightened.”
“Then he’s still in the car,” the woman said sarcastically.
I could hear the man climbing up the iron rungs on the freight cars. Then I heard his steps along the runway on the roofs. The woman went along the ground, looking in between the cars.