Billie watched him as he leaped nimbly from one rock to another. Then with one flying leap she was out of the machine and had cranked it up. At the sound of the motor the man looked up quickly, dropped the bottle with a crash of broken glass and began to run up the cliff. It was a difficult place in which to turn, and Billie was obliged to go backward down a narrow road, but the young girl kept her head and moved the machine slowly and deliberately.
“Hawkeseye come runnin’,” said the Indian woman. “White girl hurry.”
Another moment and they were headed in the other direction, but Hawkeseye had reached them. With a bound he seized the back of the machine and was lifting himself on his elbows.
Instantly Hot Air Sue whipped out a knife which she had hidden somewhere in the depths of her shawl, and slashed him across the wrist. With a yell of fury the man fell backward and lay on the ground. Billie gave one glance over her shoulder. Never had she felt so deliberately and cruelly cold-blooded as at that moment. If Buckthorne Hawkes’ back had been broken she would have gone on just the same. But it was not broken, for a second glance showed him crawling to the side of the road.
“I’m at Steptoe Lodge. Do you know where that is?” she asked Hot Air Sue, who was regarding her efforts at running the motor car with stolid admiration.
“Steptoe Lodge thirty miles away.”
“Thirty miles? That’s nothing,” replied Billie cheerfully. “Is this the right road?”
“This is first right road. This road wrong later.”
“You mean we take another road that branches off from this?”
“Umph!”