Eaton put his hand over hers which still clung to the driving wheel. "I'm going just beside the road here," he said to her, quietly. "I'm armed, of course. If those are your people, you'd better go back with them. I'm sure they are; but I'll wait and see."
She caught at his hand. "No; no!" she cried. "You must get as far away as you can before they come! I'm going back to meet and hold them." She threw the car into the reverse, backed and turned it and brought it again onto the road. He came beside her again, putting out his hand; she seized it. Her hands for an instant clung to it, his to hers.
"You must go—quick!" she urged; "but how am I to know what becomes of you—where you are? Shall I hear from you—shall I ever see you?"
"No news will be good news," he said, "until—"
"Until what?"
"Until—" And again that unknown something which a thousand times—it seemed to her—had checked his word and action toward her made him pause; but nothing could completely bar them from one another now. "Until they catch and destroy me, or—until I come to you as—as you have never known me yet!"
An instant more she clung to him. The double headlights flared into sight again upon the road, much nearer now and coming fast. She released him; he plunged into the bushes beside the road, and the damp, bare twigs lashed against one another at his passage; then she shot her car forward. But she had made only a few hundred yards when the first of the two cars met her. It turned to its right to pass, she turned the same way; the approaching car twisted to the left, she swung hers to oppose it. The two cars did not strike; they stopped, radiator to radiator, with rear wheels locked. The second car drew up behind the first. The glare of her headlights showed her both were full of armed men. Their headlights, revealing her to them, hushed suddenly their angry ejaculations. She recognized Avery in the first car; he leaped out and ran up to her.
"Harriet! In God's name, what are you doing here?"
She sat unmoved in her seat, gazing at him. Men leaping from the cars, ran past her down the road toward the ravine and the burning bridge. She longed to look once more in the direction in which Eaton had disappeared, but she did not. Avery reached up and over the side of the car and caught her arm, repeating his demand for an explanation. She could see, turning in her seat, the men who had run past surrounding Dibley on the road and questioning him. Avery, gaining no satisfaction from her, let go her arm; his hand dropped to the back of the seat and he drew it up quickly.
"Harriet, there's blood here!"