"It's me," said Elbridge's voice from the front of it, and Elbridge's head dimly showed itself. "I got to thinkin' maybe you'd want the carryall, and I didn't know but what I'd better go and hitch up, anyway."
"Oh, well, we did!" cried Adeline, with an hysterical laugh. "Here, now, father, get right in! Don't lose a second. Kiss Suzette; good-by! Be sure you get him to East Hatboro' in time for the four-forty, Elbridge!" She helped her father, shaking and stumbling, into the shelter of the curtained carryall. "If anybody tries to stop you—"
"I'd like to see anybody try to stop me," said Elbridge, and he whipped up his horse. Then he leaned back toward Northwick, and said, "I'm going to get the black colt's time out of the old mare."
"Which mare is it?" Northwick asked.
VII.
On his way home from the station, Elbridge Newton began to have some anxieties. He had no longer occasion for any about Northwick, he was safe on his way back to Canada; and Elbridge's anxieties were for himself. He was in the cold fit after his act of ardent generosity. He had no desire to entangle himself with the law by his act of incivism in helping Northwick to escape, and he thought it might be well to put himself on the safe side by seeing Putney about it, and locking the stable after the horse was stolen.
He drove round by the lawyer's house, and stopped at his gate just as Putney pushed his lawn-mower up to it, in his exercise of the instrument before breakfast.
Elbridge leaned out of the carryall, and asked, in a low confidential voice, "If J. Milton Northwick was to come back here, on the sly, say, to see his family, and I was to help him git off again, would I be li'ble?"
"Why?" asked Putney.