“As you will. But if anything happens—tetanus, blood-poisoning, collapse—I wash my hands of responsibility. Mr. Pillivant will bear me out. Let us go.”
In the hall Pillivant took down from the pegs of an alcove a cap and light overcoat.
“You don’t mind sticking on these, do you?” he said to Baltazar. “You’ll need them motoring, and besides, I don’t mind telling you, you’re not looking exactly like a candidate for a beauty show.”
“I thank you,” said Baltazar, accepting the proffered raiment.
They started. The doctor, Sergeant Doubleday and a constable, with a stretcher, in one car; Pillivant, Baltazar, and a chauffeur at the wheel, in the great Rolls-Royce.
“To carry through this,” said Pillivant, hauling out a thick gold watch, “in twenty minutes, shows what we English can do when we set our minds to it.”
“Twenty minutes?” said Baltazar. “It has seemed like three hours.”
“Twenty minutes since I went to the telephone,” Pillivant asserted triumphantly.
The cars raced on. For some moments Baltazar, huddled together in the comfort of the back seat, maintained a brooding silence, which Pillivant, glaring at him from time to time, did not care to disturb. There was something uncanny about this man who had to be bombed nearly to death in order to hear of the war.
They turned off the road on to the rough track across the moor along which Quong Ho had so often bumped his way in the old cart. The weather had been dry and the track was at its best. But the cars jolted alarmingly and at every quivering descent from a larger hummock than usual, Pillivant cried out in fear for the springs of his Rolls-Royce.