“I wouldn’t be here, and you wouldn’t, either.”
“Well,” I said, “I’ll try it,” and let out a yell: “Help! Pol—”
He came out of the chair like a cat. I saw him looming over me, and put everything I had in a right to his stomach.
It never connected.
Something hit the side of my head, seemed to pull my neck loose, and the lights went out. When I came to, I was in the agency heap rolling along pavement. My head hurt, and my jaw was so sore I could hardly move it. The big man was sitting at the wheel, and when I moved, he looked over at me, and said, “Hell, what a heap! Why doesn’t your damned agency give you decent transportation?”
I put my head out of the window so the cool night air would help clear my head. The big man kept a heavy foot on the throttle, and Bertha Cool’s car, rattling its protest, swayed from side to side along the road.
It was a mountain road, winding and twisting up a canyon. After a while it came out on a level place with pine trees standing in dark silhouettes against the starlit sky. The big man slowed down the car, apparently looking for a side road.
I watched my chance and lurched across the seat. I grabbed the steering-wheel with both hands and jerked. I couldn’t turn the wheel, although the car swerved to one side of the road and then back to the other as he exerted pressure to counteract mine. He snapped up his elbow without taking his hand off the wheel, and it caught me on the point of my sore jaw, making me loosen my grip. Something like a pile driver caught me on the back of the neck, and the next I remembered I was lying fiat on my back in the dark trying to figure where I was.
I put events into some sort of hazy sequence after a while, and groped in my pocket for matches. I found one and lit it. I was inside a log cabin, lying flat on dry pine needles. I sat up on the bunk, which was covered with old, dried pine boughs, and struck another match. I found a candle and lit it, then looked at my watch. It was quarter past three.
The cabin evidently hadn’t been used for a while. It was dirty and smelled musty. The windows were boarded up. Rats had been rummaging around the place, dragging stale bread crusts out of a cupboard. A spider, hanging in a big cobweb, seemed to be staring ominously at me. Dried pine needles from the branches on my bunk had got in my hair and, as I stood up, worked down my neck.