Forbes, seeing his prey escaping, made a mental note of the number of her car, "48150, N. Y. 1913."
He had read how the police traced fugitive motorists by their numerals, and he vowed to use the records for his own purposes. He must know who she was and how she looked. Meanwhile he must not forget that number—48150, N. Y. 1913—the mystic symbol on her chariot of translation.
CHAPTER II
HELPLESS to pursue her with more than his gaze, Forbes watched from his lofty perch how swiftly she fled northward. He could follow her car as it thridded the unpoliced traffic by that dwindling bird-of-paradise plume, that sphinxic riddle of a feathery question-mark.
He mused indulgently upon her as she vanished: "She breaks the law like all the rest when no one is there to stop her. She wheedles the police with a smile, but behind their backs she burns up the road."
Evidently there were narrow escapes from disaster. One or two pedestrians leaped like kangaroos to escape her wheels. Once or twice collisions with other cars were avoided by sharp swerves or abrupt stops.
The plume went very respectably across the Plaza, for policemen were there on fixed post; but, once beyond, the feather diminished into nothingness with the uncanny speed of a shooting-star.
She was gone. And now he wondered whither she sped, and why. To what tryst was she hastening at such dreadful pace, with such rash desire? He felt almost a jealousy, at least an envy, of the one who waited at the rendezvous.
And then he felt alarm for her. Already she might have met disaster. Her car might have crashed into some other—into a great steel-girder truck like that that crossed the Avenue. She might even now be lying all crumpled and shattered in a tangle of wreckage.