And St. George was in pursuit. So were Amory and Jarvo, and Rollo of the oil-skins, but these mattered very little, for it was St. George whose eyes burned in his pale face and were striving to catch the faintest motion in that fleeing car ahead.
"Faster, Jarvo," he said, "we're not gaining on them. I think they're gaining on us. Put ahead, can't you?"
Amory vexed the air with frantic questionings. "How did it happen?" he said. "Who did it? Was it the guard? What did they do it for?"
"It looks to me," said St. George only, peering distractedly into the gloom, "as if all those fellows had on uniforms. Can you see?"
Jarvo spoke softly.
"It is true, adôn," he said, "they are of the guard. This is what they had planned," he added to Amory. "I feared the harm would be to you. It is the same. Your turn would be the next."
"What do you mean?" St. George demanded.
Amory, with some incoherence, told him what Jarvo had come to them to propose, and heightened his own excitement by plunging into the business of that night and the next, as he had had it from the little brown man's lips.
"Up the mountain to-morrow night," he concluded fervently, "what do you think of that? Do you see us?"
"Maniac, no," said St. George shortly, "what do we want to go up the mountain for if Miss Holland is somewhere else? Faster, Jarvo, can't you?" he urged. "Why, this thing is built to go sixty miles an hour. We're creeping."