CHAPTER TWO
I
Out of the woods and once more on a smooth highway the stolen car sped like a frightened ghost through the starry night. The Governor drove with the assurance of a man who knows what he's about. Huddled in a long ulster he had found in the cabin, Archie, whose ideas of motoring had always been extremely conservative, yielded himself more and more to the inevitable. He was no longer a free agent but a plaything of circumstance. In no exaggerated sense he was a captive, a prisoner of the man beside him, whose friendliness was flattering and alarming in a breath!
At any moment they might be held up and subjected to scrutiny and questioning, and Archie experienced a tingle at the prospect; but the Governor had declared with apparent sincerity that he had never been in jail and this in itself was reassuring, for presumably a man who so keenly enjoyed his freedom was a skilled dodger of the law. The Governor, who would have passed anywhere for a successful banker or lawyer, had more of the spirit of the debonair swashbucklers of romance than any other man Archie had known. He might be a great liar, and Archie suspected that he was; and doubts of the man's sanity troubled him not a little; but it sufficed for the moment that his comrade was steering him rapidly away from Bailey Harbor, and so far had managed the business with excellent judgment.
Occasionally the Governor lifted his voice in songs of unimpeachable literary and musical quality that rang sonorously above the hum of the engine.
| "Who is Sylvia? What is she? |
| That all our swains commend her," |
he sang through to the end to the old familiar air; followed by "Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes."
They struck a stretch of road under repair and slowing up the Governor remarked carelessly as he picked his way through a line of red lanterns: