And with the last words she had started her car, after Terry's way of starting anything, with a leap. Steve reined in after her, urging his horse to a gallop for the first time, calling out sharply:
"But you—where are you going? Why——"
"After Doctor Bridges," Terry called back. "The fool is over at your old thief of a grandfather's, playing chess! The telephone won't——"
He could merely speculate as to just what the telephone would not do. Terry was gone, was already at the fork of the roads, turning northward, hasting alone on a forty-mile drive over lonely roads and into the very lair of the old mountain-lion himself. Steve whistled softly.
"I wish she had invited me to go along," he grunted.
But, instead she had commissioned him otherwise. So, though his eyes were regretful he rode on to the store. A backward glance showed him a diminishing red tail-light disporting itself like some new species of firefly gone quite mad; it was twisting this way and that as the road invited; it fairly emulated the gyrations of a corkscrew what with the added motion necessitated by the deep ruts and chuck-holes over and into which the spinning tires were thudding.
Then the shoulder of a hill, a clump of brush, and Terry and her car were gone from him, swallowed up in the night and silence. He looked at his watch. It was twenty minutes after eight. She had forty miles ahead of her, a return of forty miles.
"It will take her two hours each way," he muttered, "unless she means to pile her car up in a ditch somewhere. Four hours for the trip. That means I won't see her until well after midnight."
And then he grinned a shade sheepishly; Blenham was right. He had thought of those four hours as though they had been four years.
But for her part Terry had no intention of being four hours driving a round trip of any eighty miles that she knew of; she had never done such a thing before and could see no cause for beginning to-night. True, the roads were none too good at best, downright bad often enough.