"We're definitely out of the fight," he reported shortly, helping his companion down from the driving-seat.
Patricia was still trembling and pale.
"You mean that we can't go on to the city?" she quavered.
"Not unless we walk; and of course that is out of the question."
"Then you—you can't keep your appointment with Judge Hemingway."
Blount's smile was scornful. "I imagine it was no part of my father's plans that I should keep my appointment," he commented bitterly. "He took it for granted that I would drive out to Wartrace with you, and made his preparations accordingly. This tree wasn't here half an hour ago, and it is here now."
"I can't believe it of him," she denied, and her lip quivered. And then she added: "Just think, Evan; we might have been killed—both of us!"
Blount's teeth came together with a little clicking noise. "Politics, or what passes for politics in this God-forsaken region, seems to make no account of such a small thing as a human life or two," he said. And then: "I suppose we are due to wait until somebody comes along to pick us up. It's four miles or more back to the nearest ranch on the mesa."
"It is all my fault!" lamented the young woman. "I—I might have stopped the car, don't you think?"
"I wondered a little that you didn't at least try to stop it," he permitted himself to say; and at this she forgot the traditions, sociological or other, reverting to the type of the eternal feminine.