He saw the girl running, pulled a weapon from his hip and tried a long shot.
The crack of the Browning had hardly reached her ears before Amaryllis was in the driving-seat. But not for a flicker did she turn her eyes from the business of the moment.
Melchard, with his left hand on his hip and the barrel of the automatic resting on the upturned elbow close to his chin, was on the point of firing again at the very moment when Mut-mut, having reached the top of the ridge, was running back to meet Dick, and Dick, coming down the slope at the best of his prodigious though uneven stride, was within two paces of Melchard's back.
At the sound of his rushing approach, and in the very act of firing, Melchard started. The shot went wide, and the man turned himself and his weapon on the enemy that was nearer even than he guessed.
In the very moment of wheeling about, he received a rugger hand-off on his right jaw, which launched him many yards, sideways down the slope, to land and turn literally heels over head as he fell.
His pistol fell more slowly and further, after describing a wavering arc over his head.
And then Dick Bellamy ran; ran as he had not run since he broke the tape in a certain sprint of four hundred metres at Buenos Ayres, in forty nine and a quarter seconds. But that was when his legs were an equal pair.
Amaryllis saw it all; Mut-mut on the sky-line of the ridge, hesitating; Melchard and his pistol in eccentric parabolas; Dick, with a wisp of black hair over his wounded cheek, "flying," she called it, down the last of the slope, and crossing the level ground to her and the car; a wild man running, she thought, with the pace of a racehorse, and the movement, not of a runaway, but of a winner. "And, oh!" she would say to him afterwards, "your funny eyes! How they blazed!"
Within four strides of the car.
"Let her rip," he grunted, and taking the low door of the tonneau in his stride, landed on the back seat.