CHAPTER V
I
The two cars rushed through the night, switch-backing up and down the strange streets of that strange town. Clement had the queer feeling that he was passing through a dream city created by some fantastic fairy tale illustrator. The streets of Cobalt wound haphazard amid houses built haphazard. The bumpy driveway wriggled between buildings now on the road-level, now hanging above it on rocky outcrops. Now an ordinary side road was passed in the dusk. Now a flight of stairs shot upward in place of a road.
“We’ve got him,” said Clement cheerfully, looking out at the speeding car ahead, “and we’ll get Neuburg through him. That is, if your driver——”
“That’s all right,” said the detective Gatineau. “He’s game. I put him wise before I hired him. For twenty dollars and a little excitement he’ll do all you want him to do.”
“There may be gunning,” said Clement.
“He knows that. All he said was that the burg had been kind of sluggish anyhow for the past six months.... This is a mining town, you know. Don’t you worry, he thrives on excitement.”
The cars swept out of the town. Between the stiff, rocky hills and the giant humpings of silver mine workings they were pressing towards the wild tracts of the open country. The road grew deliriously worse.