They were well passed by this time, and despite the jerk with which Stanley brought up, Herrick had leaped out before they were stopped, and at the same moment a figure scrambled from the fallen hulk and, without a glance behind, made off across the fields. Herrick, shifting his empty revolver as he ran, till he carried it by the barrel, swung into full pursuit.
This was the more foolhardy because on getting to his feet Nicola had drawn his own revolver, from which Herrick had to dodge as he ran, and at length indeed to throw himself down, and get forward only by his hands and knees. They were now in a broken, stony lot, spotted with underbrush; a brook running through it, and here and there tall chestnut trees. By screening himself with these, and making a run for it in any patch of shadow, he kept his man in sight and even gained upon him; he was waiting till Nicola's gun should be as empty as his own before he came to closer quarters. For this he knelt and rose and ran and crawled, now showing himself, to draw—and waste!—a bullet; and now plumping down among bushes. It was at one of these moments that he heard a shot behind him and, peering through the screen of twigs, saw that Nicola's comrades had freed themselves from the ditch and were advancing, apparently full-armed, and he of the uninjured hand beating the coverts as they came. They called to each other, and in Italian sure enough; and they carried a lantern from Stanley's car. What had become of Stanley? And what now was he himself to do?
He crept forward to the edge of his thicket and could just make out a figure, not very far off, running heavily across a cleared space. Then, in a blanket of darkness, the figure disappeared as though through a trap-door, and Herrick, for all his listening, could hear only the calling and trampling of the men with the lamp. He told himself that Nicola had taken a leaf from his own book and was perhaps lying flattened to the earth—there came a disturbance in the bushes, a jar along the ground, as of some one plunging back from that cleared space toward the road; it appeared to him that a bulk of blacker blackness appeared and disappeared where those sounds rose. But the moon had so gone under a cloud that he could not be sure. So he thought; and then his heart leaped to admit the blessed truth—the moon had set! He slipped to his feet and fled, swift as a shadow and strong as a hound, after the heavier runner. He had guessed the truth, that Nicola was returning to the road. He had been led out across the fields on a false scent, but now Nicola, thinking to have doubled and shaken him off, was on the home trail straight for the high road. They came out upon it perhaps two hundred feet to the south of their empty motors; Herrick steadily gaining, and surprised cries and lantern-flashes piercing the field they had left behind. But as Herrick lifted his gun to let the lagging quarry have its butt-end, suddenly Nicola pitched forward and lay at his feet. He brought up short, suspicious of a trick. And then he remembered how Nicola had clapped his hand to the back of his neck. Holding the gun ready, he stooped and put his own hand to the same spot. It was covered with something hot and wet, which Herrick, with a surprising lack of sentiment, wiped off on the man's coat; he tried to lift the senseless figure and get it back to his own car. Something fell out of Nicola's breast with a little silver tinkle. The sound, as of some woman's trinket, drove the sense out of Herrick's head. Though he might as well have run up an electric target, he struck a match. A silver locket lay in his hand. It had been violently wrested from a neck-chain in whose wrenched links a thread or two of lace still clung. In one broken side the glass had been ground to fragments, as though under a man's heel, but the marred lines of a likeness were still there. The likeness, cut from an old kodak picture, was of Will Denny. Some one, like Signor Gabrielli, had never voluntarily parted with the features of her love! Out of the locket's other side, warm from Nicola's breast and unmarred but by the trickling of his blood, cried mutely, eagerly, to Herrick the fresh youth of Nancy Cornish.
Almost as he saw the bullets sang about him, as if he had charged into a bee hive. The lamp the Italians carried swallowed up his little match and picked him out with brightness, holding him in the circle of its light. He snatched up Nicola's gun and pulled the trigger, but the barrel was empty as that of his own; he might have flung himself down and taken his chance to crawl off in the ditch, but he had no mind to die like that; and what he did was to snatch off his coat and hold it before him, back and forth like a moving screen, as he ran forward into the mouth of the revolvers to crack at least one man on the head with his cold weapon before he fell. Just then from down the road a fresh volley of bullets shattered the night, and the voice of Stanley and the sheriff came to him like music.
The rescue which so much firing had helped Stanley to summon swept in full chase after the Pascoes and the tables were completely turned. But the shouts of the sheriff's party—"Got one?" "No; haven't you?" "Hi, Williams, they must have got over the wall of the Hoover place!" "We'll scramble over from the hood and see if they've struck down to the river!" "Blake, you and Cobbett drive round and ring up the lodge. Them old folks are easy a million, but get 'em up!"—warned Herrick of a blank in the sequel. And sure enough when the conquerors foregathered, the escape of the Pascoes, presumably by the river, was the end of their conquest.
For this had they fought and ridden, crawled and run! No wonder they felt a certain need of cheering each other with what gains they had. There was the yellow house; the home of the Pascoes and their Arm of Justice, the rainbow end of Kane's dream! And there, in the ditch beside them was a vague tumble of wreckage. "Hail, and farewell!" Herrick whistled, with a curious laugh. "We've met once too often!" For there, at least, was the end of his acquaintance, the gray touring-car.
As the two young men reëntered New York with the milk wagons and drove soberly through the Park, a cool gray light, more like darkness than light and yet perfectly and strangely clear like shadowed water, had begun to break above the sleeping town. Then Herrick drew from his pocket his paper puzzle and spread it out beside him on the rear seat of the car.
| This time | get rid of her. |
| I say. She | but she can't g |
| real dau | mother |
| et rid | do the way |
| een any | |
| but | |
| She can | she's got to |
| mebbe | ain't ever b |
| of | ghter to me |
Some of the connections were obvious enough, but what the torn edges helped him still further to form was a purely domestic statement. "This time she's got to do the way I say. She ain't ever been any real daughter to me. But—" Then there was a bit gone. Then, "She can get rid of" word missing, "mebbe, but she can't get rid of her mother—"
"Well!" cried Stanley in disdainful disappointment. "What's that got to do with anything?"