"Get back into the car," he commanded, "and take this young woman and myself to Newbury. And mind you do it. No nonsense. Do you know the road?"
Bagsby muttered sullenly that he did, and then, just when I was safely in the tonneau and had drawn a long breath, Sir George stopped with his foot on the step and—I think he swore. Then he put the revolver in my hand and pointed it at Bagsby's neck.
"Do you know how to shoot?" he demanded.
"Ye—yes."
"I have forgotten my mackintosh," he explained curtly. "Shoot him if he attempts to start the car." He turned in the doorway to say: "Don't take your finger off the trigger." I might just as well have been pointing the automobile wrench, for there was nothing in the revolver.
Then he went into the cottage, and was gone fully a minute. But the strange thing was that as he went into the house a lightning flash lit up his figure, and he had his mackintosh over his arm! However, he might have meant his goloshes, which is English for overshoes and sounds like mackintosh. (I know at home I always confuse Wabash and Oshkosh.) While he was in the house the second strange thing happened. Bagsby squirmed in his seat in front of me and said in a muffled voice: "Be easy with that trigger, Miss!"
It was not Bagsby at all! It was the prisoner we had locked in the inner room!
"Oh!" I said limply, and the revolver slid out of my lap. He turned cautiously and bent over the back of the driver's seat.
"Everything's all right," he said quickly. "You are perfectly safe; I am going to take you home. Unload that revolver, won't you, before he gets back? Or let me do it."
"It is unloaded," I quavered. "I did it myself. But why——?"