The Lone Wolf Returns

by Louis Joseph Vance

Directed by the speaker, the two underlings, with no noteworthy enthusiasm, surrendered the torch and their leisure, lifted the body of the drunkard by the legs and shoulders and, staggering with the weight of that inert lump, made crabwise progress toward the rear entrance to the inn, the manager following with the light while Lanyard turned back to Eve with a suggestion clearly articulated for the benefit of whatever ears might care to hear.

"If you'll make yourself comfortable in the car, I promise I won't keep you waiting long."

"Thank you," Eve equably returned. "I don't mind waiting, and I do want to be sure that poor boy is in no real danger."

Lanyard offered Eve a hand, but the door he unlatched was one that admitted not to the car but to the front seat of the driver's right.

"Quick!" he urged in an undertone, and when Eve was in place doubled round to the other side of the brougham.

But the manager was not napping. "Here now!" he remonstrated, jolted out of his vocational urbanity, and came running back—"thought you said you couldn't—"

The moonlight silvered something In his hand which might or might not have been the darkened torch, and which Lanyard could not afford to give the benefit of the doubt. Standing on the running-board, without the smallest compunction he planted a foot in the midriff of the man so forcibly that the latter dropped whatever it was he had been holding and, with a yelp, doubled up.

Immediately settling into place behind the wheel, Lanyard released the emergency brake, with the result that the brougham, standing on a slight down-grade, began to move of its own weight even before he could locate the starting pedal. Muttering a prayer of thankfulness, he meshed the gears in third and swung the car into the down-hill road. At the same time the two who had been carrying the chauffeur let their senseless burden drop and started in pursuit. One tripped over some inequality in the ground and plunged to his knees. The other gained the running-board in a bound and aimed a blow at Lanyard's head. It went wide, and Lanyard's fist glanced upon the fellow's jaw with sufficient weight to dislodge him. Beating the air with frantic arms, he disappeared.

Fumbling for the switch with one hand, with the other Lanyard steered for the maw of the road through the woods. For one more instant the inn, painted with pale lunar phosphorescence, stood out in bold relief against its background of blurred forest, while with the tail of his eye Lanyard saw its front door of a sudden release a stream of saffron light. Somebody shouted in profane astonishment, somebody stumbled out upon the veranda and pelted toward the parking space. Then, between two heartbeats, Lanyard solved the secret of headlights and ignition, and the brougham, momentum sharply hastened, swept on into the pillared tunnel through the pines.

At first, hands that hadn't grasped a wheel in years had all they could do to hold the lurching fabric to a sharply declivitous and twisting path. Then the grade grew more moderate, the way less tortuous, and the car, obedient to its brakes, slipped gently past the fiery sign and turned its nose southwards on the highway.