“I gotcha,” replied the chauffeur.
The slowing car hugged the inside of the sharp turn, Larry holding the door open and waiting his moment. The instant the taxi made the curve Lefty's car was cut from view; and that instant Larry sprang from the running-board, slamming the door behind him, landed on soft earth and scuttled in among the trees. Crouching in the shadows he saw his car speed away as per his orders, and the moment after he saw Lefty's car, evidently taken by surprise by this obvious attempt at escape, leap forward in hot pursuit.
Larry slipped farther in among the trees and sat down, his back against a tree. This was better. For the time he was safe.
He drew a long breath. Then for a moment what he had just been through this last hour came back to him in an almost amusing light: as something grotesquely impossible—much like those helter-skelter, utterly unreal chases which, with slight variations of personalities and costumes, were the chief plots for the motion-picture drama in its crude childhood. But though there seemed a likeness, there was a tremendous difference. For this was real! Every one was in earnest!
Again he thought of Maggie. What would she think, what would be her attitude, if she knew the truth about him?—the truth about those she had gone with and the life she had gone into? Would she be inclined toward HIM, would she help him?...
Again he thought of what he should do. Now that he commanded a composure which had not been his during the stress of his flight, he examined every aspect with greater care. But the conclusions of composure were the same as those of excitement. He could not gain entrance to one of the great hotels and remain in his room, unidentified among its thousands of strangers; he could not find asylum in one of his old haunts; he dared not try to leave Manhattan. He was a prisoner, whose only privilege was a larger but most uncertain liberty.
And that liberty was becoming penetratingly uncomfortable. An hour had passed, the ground on which he sat was wet and cold, and the misty air was assuming a distressing kinship with departed winter and was making shivering assaults upon his bones. At the best, he realized, he could not hope to remain secure in this cultivated wilderness beyond daylight. With the coming of morning he would certainly be the prey of either his pals or the police. And if they did not beat him from his hiding, plain mortal hunger would drive him out into the open streets. If he was to do anything at all, he must do it while he still had the moderate protection of the night.
And then for the first time there came to him remembrance of Hunt's rapid injunction, given him in the hurly-burly of escape when no thoughts could impress the upper surface of his mind save those of the immediate moment. “If you're trapped, call Plaza nine-double-o-one and say 'Benvenuto Cellini.'”
Larry had no idea what that swift instruction might be about. And the chance seemed a slender, fantastical one, even if he could safely get to a public telephone. But it seemed his only chance.
He arose, and, keeping as much as he could to the wilder regions of the park, and making the utmost use of shadows when he had to cross a path or a drive, he stole southward. He remembered a drug-store at Eighty-Fourth Street and Columbus Avenue, peculiarly suited to his purpose, for it had a side entrance on Eighty-Fourth Street and was in a neighborhood where policemen were infrequent.