“The poor dear!” she cried. “Oh, don’t tell me those horrid people have hurt her.”
Voles who had choked Winifred into insensibility with a mixture of alcohol, chloroform, and ether—a scientific anesthetic used by all surgeons, rapid in achieving its purpose and quite harmless in its effects—was far more surprised than Polly. He never expected to be greeted in this way, but rather to be met by some helper of Carshaw’s posed there, and he was prepared to fight or trick his adversary as occasion demanded.
He had carried Winifred down a servants’ stairs and made his way out of the house by a back door. The exit was unguarded. In this, as in many other country mansions, the drive followed a circuitous sweep, but a path through the trees led directly toward the gate. Hence, his passage had neither been observed from the hall nor overheard by Polly.
It was in precisely such a situation as that which faced him now that Voles was really superb. He was an adroit man, with ready judgment and nerves of steel.
“Not much hurt,” he said quietly. “She has fainted from shock, I think.”
Though he spoke so glibly, his brain was on fire with question and answer. His eyes glowered at the car and its occupant, and swept the open road on either hand.
To Polly’s nostrils was wafted a strange odor, carrying reminiscences of so-called “painless” dentistry. Winifred, reviving in the open air when that hateful sponge was removed from mouth and nose, struggled spasmodically in the arms of her captor. Polly knew that women in a faint lie deathlike. That never-to-be-forgotten scent, too, caused a wave of alarm, of suspicion, to creep through her with each heart-beat.
“Where are the others?” she said, leaning over, and striving to see Voles’s face.
“Just behind,” he answered. “Let me place Miss Bartlett in the car.”