“Bull,” he said. “I’m putting my cards on the table with you and Del, here.”
He told them briefly of the message from Mary, the need of haste; then, of his mission, and of the help that was even now due, or would be, with the morning. If they were coming with him, northward along that road of peril, word must be left behind.
Kane thought a moment; then, wheeling swiftly, with muttered word, he disappeared in the darkness, to return presently with the good news that he had fixed it with the station-agent. The latter had just come on; he was a friend of Kane’s, and no friend of Rook and Company; he would see to it, Kane said, that the reinforcements would be warned.
Boarding the car, they swung out cautiously along the silent street, under the pale stars, northward along that shadowy road. Presently there would be a moon, but just now they went onward in a thick darkness, with, just ahead, the dim loom of the road, flowing backward under the wheels, which presently ran like a ribbon of pale flame under the bright beam of the lights.
A half mile from the town, and Bull, who was driving, opened up, and the car leaped forward with the rising drone of the powerful motor, thirty, forty, fifty miles an hour; the wind of their passage drove backward like a wall as the giant’s voice came now in a rumbling laugh:
“Some little speed-wagon, Mr. Annister, ha?” he said. “An’ that’s whatever! It ought to be. The man who owns it—who did own it half an hour ago—he’s some particular, I’ll say! Because—it’s Mister Hamilton Rook’s!”
Annister laughed grimly in answer, speaking a low word of caution as, after perhaps a half hour of their racing onrush the lights glimmered on dark trees to right and left.
“Somewhere about here, I think,” he said, low. “Three outside guards, I understand. We’d better stop a little way this side, Bull ... that’s it. Now, look!”
As the big car slid slowly to a halt, the moon, rising above the trees, showed them, perhaps a hundred yards just ahead, a low, rambling, stone house, its windows like blind eyes to the night. Upon its roof the moonlight lay like snow, and even at that distance it was sinister, forbidding, as if the evil that was within had seeped through those stones, outward, in a creeping tide.