“Madame is gone!” the maid cried in wonder.
“Not here!” echoed the two men.
John went to the desk in the study and stood drumming his fingers on the cover of an account book. The servants waited respectfully for us to speak. The maid looked much more cheerful in the face of possible tragedy.
“It may be all right,” I said, “we know that. But it also may not be.” I turned to the servants, “Have you extra petrol for our car?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, gnädiger Herr,” they answered in chorus. We had achieved a good deal of prestige in the last few minutes.
“Yes,” John said, “you’re right, Carvin. It would take them ten minutes to get down that hill and into the car. Whatever path there is isn’t visible at night, and it can’t be very good. They went not twenty minutes ago, I’m sure. They won’t have so much of a start—not more than fifteen minutes. They won’t think we are following, and I can show a bit of speed, too. Come along, hurry up. I’ll see the gas put in and get the car into the yard while you get our things. Be sure you bring me a cap and some cigarettes, and a coat—it’s cold on that Pass.”
It was a quarter to five by the clock on the dash as the big gates opened for us for the second time. It had been a quarter past eight as we drove in through them. Our carefully planned visit to Helena had lasted barely nine hours.
Before us our lamps cast a long white trail on the still muddy road. John stepped on the accelerator and we leaped ahead down the hill. In a moment we were going so fast that in his effort to hold the car on the winding road, he sat still and tense, moving only at the curves, and then so studiedly that he seemed almost automatic. The speedometer climbed up and up, then dropped somewhat for a sharp curve, then climbed again. We were making an almost impossible pace for so winding a road. I reflected that if another car should appear ahead of us we were unlikely ever to know it. The wreck would be so complete that it was not necessary to worry about it. It is only half wrecks that are terrifying. A neat, quick smashing is a more or less jolly end to a life that is only interesting at intervals. This happened to be very much one of the intervals, however. Certainly I didn’t want to be wrecked before we had sifted the mystery, and found Helena.
As we neared the bottom of the hill, the whole valley proved to be bathed in mist thick enough to cloud the windshield, so that John was forced to lean out of the car to see the road, which was wet and a little slippery. I busied myself pushing up the glass. It was hard to manage at that pace, but I got it up just in time, for a moment after John righted himself we passed a car facing in the opposite direction, mending a tire. They seemed, in the quick glance I spared them, to have finished. A man was throwing the blown shoe into the tonneau. The whole thing flashed by so suddenly that I scarcely gave it a thought, except that as we skinned past I heard a shout that flashed by as quickly as the car from which it came.
“Lucky miss, that,” John grunted.