ANTONY had now--so wonderfully resilient is youth--won sufficient confidence in himself to realise that there was yet a chance of bringing this dangerous expedition to some sort of successful issue, if fate should prosper them with a straight and empty road. They were not, fortunately, travelling at any tremendous rate of speed; though jumping from the car would have been extremely unwise, it remained a possibility, at least, and if, as was fairly probable, the car had already travelled a considerable distance, its motive power would become exhausted sooner or later and they could dismount safely. In a few curt sentences he explained the situation, as it appeared to him, to his companion.

"I must beg you to believe," he concluded, "that I somehow got a distinct impression of your telling me that you were used to managing these things--I cannot understand how I could have 43 made such a mistake. I am particular in repeating this, because in case of accident--and it would be the merest idiocy to deny that a very grave accident is quite likely to happen at any moment--I do not want you to think too hardly of me. But of course your realise that unless I had been quite certain of your ability I should never have attempted such a foolhardy thing."

She made no answer, and at the risk of losing his straight course he stole a rapid glance at her.

To his surprise she was crimson with what was obvious, even to his fleeting view, as embarrassment. Her fingers twisted nervously; the tears that suffused her eyes were certainly not tears of grief or fright. She bit furiously at her under lip, and began more than one sentence that faltered away into confusion. Indeed, they had triumphantly climbed and descended a hill that sent Antony's heart into his throat before she succeeded in the task she evidently loathed but had as evidently determined to fulfil.

"Mr.--Mr. Tony," she began suddenly, alarmed in her turn at their increased speed as they went down the hill, "in case, as you say, anything should happen, I must tell you something. When I said 44 that about--about my running the car perfectly well----"

"You didn't, of course, put it in that way," he interjected, as she seemed unable to go on.

"Oh, didn't I?" she asked. "I thought you said I did."

"You said that they ran themselves, you remember, and that you were used to them," he reminded her, "and I took that to mean----"

"Oh, that's what I said," she repeated, thoughtfully.

"Don't you know what you said?" he demanded, a spasm of terror catching him and quickening his heart-beat as a great waggon loomed into sight horribly near them. Despairingly he glanced at the shining metal paraphernalia that encompassed him--his eye fell upon an unmistakable brass horn at his right, terminating in a rubber bulb. This could be but one thing, and cautiously loosening one clammy hand from the wheel, he pressed the bulb nervously. A loud, harsh cry from its brazen throat relieved him inexpressibly and sent a glow of confidence through him. He repeated the pressure, the driver of the cart looked leisurely around, and with a 45 scowl drew off to one side of the road. Antony's blood resumed its normal pace, and as the course was now clear for a moment, anyway, he repeated his question:

"Don't you know what you said?"

The trees, the full brooks, the grazing cattle, unrolled behind them like a painted ribbon for several seconds before she answered. At length his ear caught a faint, short murmur.

"N--no." 46

"Why not?" he demanded briefly.

"I would rather not tell you," she replied with a return of her old spirit.

"You must tell me," he said angrily. "Here come two carriages--oh, why did I never notice how they stopped these things? Reach under my arms and squeeze that horn--quick!"

The carriages separated and he went, quaking, between them.

"Now, go on--this luck can hardly last," he warned her. "I intend to know for how much of this nightmare I am responsible."

"You are responsible for all of it, then," she cried recklessly. "You had not the slightest excuse for making me drink all that nasty, burning stuff!"

Regardless of his wheel, Antony turned and stared at her, and only her shriek of terror saved them from the stone wall that bordered a curve in the road.

"You mean you were----"

"If you dare to say it I shall jump!" she interrupted, plucking nervously at her skirt, and he saw that she was quite capable of carrying out the threat. 47

"But--but you drank it yourself--I thought you knew----" he stammered.

"It was down in my throat--I couldn't help it--I pushed it away as soon as I could--I never tasted anything but champagne and sherry and I thought they were all the same, those things. . ."

She was on the point of tears now, and even in his keen sense of danger Antony was conscious of a gratified consciousness of that calm masculine superiority so long denied him.

"I see, I see," he said hastily. "I am very sorry. I did the best I could at the time: I am not accustomed to resuscitating fainting young ladies and I rather lost my head. I assure you that I assume all the blame."

"I think you had better," she replied vindictively, and Antony's conscious magnanimity collapsed instantly into an intense irritation.

"I must beg you to observe," he said, somewhat jerkily, as they bounced up and down the irregularities of a rough country road, "that I am hardly responsible, even with the best will in the world, for your inability to consume five or six swallows of bad whisky without--without----" in a panic of terror as her hands flew to her skirts and her knees stiffened, he concluded 48 impotently, "oh, have it any way you like! It's all my fault. Now, for heaven's sake, sit still and listen to me. Do you or do you not know anything whatever about motor cars? I ask because it is absolutely necessary," he added hastily.

"I know nothing whatever about them," she returned with an icy finality, an air of uninterested irresponsibility, that maddened even while it appalled him.

"Very good; neither do I," he said. "We are, as you see, on a long, empty, practically uninhabited country road. This is extremely fortunate for us, but it will not last much longer, for we are coming into Huntersville, which was, on the occasion when I last went through it in one of these ungodly machines, full of babies, chickens, unhitched horses, and large, disagreeable dogs. Rather than go through Huntersville I would run this thing at a tree, now. If I could estimate the force of the shock, I'd do it anyway. But I cannot estimate it, and I do not want to frighten you to death. Besides, it might send the thing backward. The same reasoning applies to a steep bank. Now, as I remember it, there is a wild sort of road that turns off to the left very soon and goes up 49 a long hill somewhere or other. I haven't the least idea where, but it must lead to something. My idea would be to go up that road and try to wear the machinery out on it. If it runs into a field, it can't be helped. At any rate, I think there is less risk. Are you willing to try it?"

His sincere and serious manner had its effect and she answered simply, "Anything that you think is best, of course. But could we not experiment a little, and try to stop it? It cannot be anything very complicated, since it has to be done so often."

"No, no, no!" Antony cried nervously, "not while I'm in my right mind! It may seem foolish to you," he continued more stiffly, "but I have reached my limit of experiment. I--I know nothing of any kind of machinery--I loathe it. As soon as I began anything of that sort, my nerve would go. You remember the result when you stamped on that brass knob? Well, I admit that I am not equal to a repetition, to be quite frank."

"I thought men always understood machinery," she murmured impatiently. "All the men I know are quite clever at it."

Now, curiously enough, this pettish and really inexcusable 50 fling did not produce its presumable effect upon Antony. Whether he felt that it was partly justified and that he was really in some sort unworthy of his sex, or whether the actuality of their pressing danger rendered him immune as regards such flighty stabs, is not known, but it remains a fact that he merely pursed his lips indulgently and spoke as follows:

"You are indeed fortunate in your acquaintance. I regret that practice in steering horses, sail boats, bob sleds and to a certain small extent, dirigible balloons, has left me little leisure--and less inclination--for these evil-smelling devil-waggons. Neither the steamfitter nor the engineer has ever appealed to me----"

He ceased abruptly, and as his voice died out she looked questioningly at him, for even her slight acquaintance with the young gentleman had taught her that he was not one to leave a well-planned sentence incomplete from choice.

"What is it?" she asked breathlessly.

"That wild road is on the other side of Huntersville!" he said, with an utter absence of comment that impressed her more deeply than any of his previous conversational embroideries. 51

Indeed, the pointed spire of the Huntersville church rose white before them and scattered houses even now lined the road.

"I wish we were going uphill now," Antony began, "and I should advise you to jump. I don't believe you'd make such a mess of it as a great many girls would be likely to. Of course, you might have on the last hill, but I hated the idea of it. It may be steering will do. But if it's a question of running someone down, you'll have to, of course, and I'll turn sharp about and take my chance. Or aim at tree. Now, blow the horn hard, please, and when I say jump, go the way the car is going, and clear it well. You may sprain your ankle or get a bruise or two, but that won't kill you. It's a small sort of place, and we might get through. Don't stop the horn a moment. What's that idiot doing?"

On the side of the road an overgrown boy of eighteen hopped wildly on one foot, the other stretched at right angles in front of him, while his lank red wrists beat the air like the arms of a windmill.

These apparently purposeless evolutions he performed mechanically so long as his ungainly figure filled their vision, and the 52 maniac appearance of the yokel rasped Antony's over-strained nerves unendurably.

"If that is a fair sample of Huntersville youth, it would be a real blessing to the community to murder a few," he muttered malevolently, as they dashed, at what seemed to him a terribly accelerated pace, into the little town. A large sign-board sprang up suddenly, as it seemed, and faced them.

Village limits. Slow down to six miles an hour (it read) by order of Commissioners. Offenders Will be----

But Antony, though desirous of reading further, even at the cost of a halt, was unable to do so.

It was high noon and the main artery of travel could not have assumed a condition more favourable to an unwilling excursionist. Save for a group of children, which scattered to safety at 53 the steady warning of the horn, and a laggard team of greys, whose languid progress from the middle of the road to their legitimate anchorage at the side cost their master his hind wheel, only a pompous speckled hen disputed their right of way. To his companion's shriek of horror--"The hen! The hen, Mr. Tony!"--Antony replied only, through set teeth, "This is no time to think of hens-- blow that horn!" and drove like Attila the implacable over whatever of domesticity and motherhood that obstinate fowl may have represented. One more heap of empty barrels making a treacherous curve, one more angry woman, leaping into a puddle to protect her wide-eyed urchin, one heart-stifling ne'er-do-weel lurching at the last possible quarter-second with drunken luck, out of destruction's way, and it was over: Antony, firmly convinced 54 that his hair must be snowy white, suffered the pent-up breath to escape at last from his lungs, only to catch it desperately again as a burly man, whose ostentatiously drawn-back coat displayed a gleaming metal badge, stood deliberately before them, not a hundred feet away, and waved his hand with unmistakable meaning. In this hand fluttered a bit of yellow paper which recalled irresistible memories of the telegraph office; the other grasped a large nickel watch that winked derisively in the sunlight.

"Stop!" he bellowed majestically, and balanced upon his bow legs.

On one side stretched a hastily constructed barrier of old boards and flimsy crates through which the blue sky line gleamed in bright bars; on the other a heavy waggon rested at an evidently intentional slant.

"Blow, blow!" gasped Antony, and, "Get out of the way, you fool!" he cried with ineffective hoarseness, grinding his teeth as it became apparent that the creature meant to brazen it through.

"Look out! We can't stop! Oh, please go away!" 55

The shrill scream of the girl at his side accomplished more than the horn: the terror in her eyes spoke loudly for her, and with a face wherein rage and incredulity struggled, this vidous obstructor of highways stepped unwillingly aside and left them a scant five feet of passageway. But for Antony, in his present state of nerves, five feet was all too scant. Had he then escaped all the chances 56 and changes of this mad morning, had he won through by a miracle of success, only to be balked at the last by an incalculable old village marplot? Should a paunchy waddler of this sort wreck at once his pride and his car? Thus he frothed and boiled in his heart, and perhaps that overheated organ clouded his eyes and vibrated in his wrists, for the heavy front wheels of the great vehicle crashed into the flimsy right-hand barrier, mowed down the crates and planking as if they had been of straw, scattered them, crackling and clattering, far and wide; and worse than this, the hind wheels, with an utterly unintentional flirt which had nevertheless all the effect of a malicious and brilliantly executed manoeuvre, jolted the barrier-waggon so violently that the horse attached to it sprang quickly forward, thus unfortunately upsetting the pursy and authoritative native who had retreated to that side for safety. Down he rolled in the dust, yelling frantically, while the frightened horse with a sharp turn fled back through the town, scattering still further the wreckage of the ill-fated barricade. Nette, turning involuntarily, saw all this and saw, too, that even as he bit the dust the outraged wearer of the metal badge still clutched, and as it seemed to her 57 brandished, with a sinister motion the square of yellow paper.

She stole a glance at Antony, but his set jaw and lowering brow did not invite confidences, and she sat in silence during the few remaining moments that sufficed to set them free of the village outskirts.

"Here is the road," said Antony briefly as they turned into a winding, stony track that closed behind them like a gate; and on this occasion no untoward happening checked the deep breath that he allowed himself.

"I have ridden along this road ten miles at least," he continued, "and it is practically deserted. They have to keep it in some sort of shape because it is the only way they have to haul timber in the autumn from the woods beyond, and telegraph poles; then they send them away by boat down the river. I never followed it to the end, but I should suppose it would wind into Brookdale, which is on the Northern Trunk Division, and nowhere near us by rail, you know."

"Brookdale . . . Brookdale?" she murmured vaguely, as he seemed to be waiting for her to speak. 58

"What I propose to do," he went on, quite easily now, and steering the car, within the simple limits possible, almost unconsciously, "is to go on like this as long as the road is deserted as it is now. As soon as we reach Brookdale--or whatever village we touch first--I will try to find a big enough sweep to turn around in and simply retrace our way. This I shall continue to do until this brutal machinery runs down. It will be dull, but safe. All the farmhouses have turns for their own waggons, and I can be fairly sure of a clear path around a watering trough or sign board, you see. There is a good broad sweep, I noticed, in front of the last farm before we turn into the woods here and I'm not afraid to go as near Huntersville as that. To begin with, they'd never believe that we would be so foolish as to come back, and they will naturally suppose that we took the regular state road and got across the river; touring-cars like this don't go up this way--unless they are obliged to," he added grimly, as an unusually rough spot shook them till their very teeth rattled. "I hope you approve of this plan?" he concluded politely.

"I suppose it is the best thing to do, considering 59 everything," she answered after a little pause, "though I wish . . . when shall we reach Brookdale?"

"I am unable to tell you," Antony replied with a touch of asperity, "and I really cannot see what difference it makes, since we can hardly hope to stop there on our first trip."

"To be sure," she said, "I forgot. You manage the car so well that I forgot that you can't do anything you like with it. You must excuse me."

At these words a comforting and fragrant warmth, the very subtle aroma of well-being, stole about Antony's heart, and his face relaxed insensibly. He could the more readily excuse her ingenuous error because he had more than once in the last hour fallen into it himself. It was difficult to believe that his control of this cumbrous soft-bitted monster, answering so sweetly to the slightest contraction of his wrist, was merely nominal; that only the most extraordinary good fortune stood between him and crushing ruin.

"Why do you suppose that ugly fat man wanted to stop us, Mr. Tony?" Nette demanded suddenly--"did he have any right to, or any reason?" 60

Antony sighed thoughtfully, and his various feelings struggled in his face.

"As to his rights," he answered judicially, "I really could not say. He certainly had some kind of badge. But as to his reasons, I fear the only difficulty will be to count them."

"To count them?" she repeated curiously. "Are there so many, then?"

Antony shrugged his shoulders expressively.

"In the first place," he began, "we are supposed to have purposely irritated an extremely unpleasant old snake to the point of biting, perhaps fatally, a French chauffeur. If fatally, the law wants us on that account. In the second place, we have stolen a large 61 and costly touring car and are apparently occupied in making away with it as fast as possible. And the law wants us on that account. In the third place, we have violated the speed regulations of Huntersville and refused to stop when called upon to answer for it, and the law wants us on that account. In the fourth place, we have knocked down and, for all I know, seriously injured an official of Huntersville, and the law wants us on that account. Do I make myself clear?"

"Quite clear," she replied soberly, and then, without the slightest warning, she burst into a rich gurgle of laughter, so rollicking and infectious that Antony had joined her before he realised it, and the wood rang with their united mirth. The massive mechanism, whose least lever they could not have explained, had it been to save their lives, rolled ponderously along, clanking and hissing beneath them; and they, perched like flippant butterflies on its upholstered surface, chuckled and trilled and rejoiced in their youth. As the Indian child leads the mighty elephant by a leash of meadow grass, so Antony directed his car with a flick of the wrist, and like the child thought nothing of what he did, save that it was amusing and showed forth his mightiness. Death glided along 62 beside them, revolving softly with each turn of the four broad tires; terror lurked at every vine-twisted bend in the road; not a smooth beech nor a rough chestnut but might have hidden behind it some horrid destiny--and they rode on lightly, as the froth on the breaker before it crashes on the beach.

Upon Antony, indeed, positive serenity had fallen, and a consciousness of readiness for any emergency. It was with some strong sense of this that he leaned down to his companion and said with a masterful smile--the smile of one whose thorough acquaintance with himself precludes any idea of self-gratulation:

"Perhaps, my dear Miss Nette, it is, after all, as well that you have one of us despised young fellows with you to-day? Even the most fascinating of greybeards might have found this crisis a little too much for him?"

Only the lowest curve of her flushed cheek was visible. Grapelike curls of warm brown shielded her eyes, but he remembered their astonishing blue and glanced with keen appreciation at her silken instep to strengthen the memory. When all was said, what pluck she had! How many girls would have skimmed so swiftly and surely 63 down that hill, would have faced a danger so evident with such buoyant courage, would have smiled so comradely in the face of fear? What if her tongue were a little sharp? She was not the ordinary brainless twitterer of her age. And something more than brain had flashed and deepened in her eyes. . . . She was speaking.

"Perhaps, my dear Mr. Tony," she responded affably--alas, too affably--"it is, after all, as well to remember that even the least fascinating of greybeards would be hardly likely to involve me in such a crisis!"

The car rose to a large irregular stone that punctuated the already rough road, and Antony bounced angrily from his seat, descending with a shock that jarred his spine throughout its length. It seemed to him that the machinery clanked and laboured more heavily, that they were going a little more slowly; only a little, perhaps, but still more slowly. But he was too vexed to care if their progress were slow or quick. He loathed the pert, confident creature at his side from the bottom of his heart. Viewed in the sudden sultry heat of his feelings, what was her self-possession but brazen effrontery? Was such diabolic quickness of riposte even 64 creditable to her years and sex? He considered the situation briefly: why were they in their present plight? Because, to put the matter baldly, he had been misled by the statements of a young woman who had openly admitted herself in no condition to be held responsible for her words--a pretty state of things! Really, it was hardly . . . hardly . . . but she was speaking again.

"Mr. Tony," she said softly (she had the knack of making a soft murmur rise above the clamour of the machinery), "please do not think, Mr. Tony, that I do not appreciate your courage, and--and sensibleness after it all happened! And I fully realise that it was partly my--that I--that if I had not----"

"Not at all," he answered stiffly, taking pity in spite of himself at her evident embarrassment. "As you implied, the initial responsibility was all mine."

But though his words were stiff, his heart had grown insensibly supple under the pressure of her voice. After all, what did her condition prove--that condition that had prompted their mad flight-- but her very innocence and ignorance of alcoholic stimulant? A 65 very good showing, in these relaxed and indecorous days. We should always try to be just.

Drifting on these conflicting tides of feeling, Antony ceased to study the winding road with the severe scrutiny he had hitherto applied to it, and as the way was now very rough, he failed utterly to observe for what it was, a certain grassy cart track curving into their path, and took it with a twist of the wheel, even as his companion cried out in alarm.

"What are you doing? This cannot be right!" she warned, but it was too late, and Antony realized that on the very verge of the 66 wood road, just as he should have looked for a space to turn in and retrace their safe course, he had left that course entirely and was steering along a now barely perceptible wheelway through a rough and rolling pasture lot.

He shut his lips tightly and affected not to have heard her, and for a few seconds they rode, in silence, through the stony field. Suddenly she grasped his arm and for the first time terror sharpened her voice.

"Oh! oh! see those cows! Oh, don't you see them? Go back! Go back!"

Antony shook her off impatiently and grazed a stump on the right only to bump against a jagged boulder on the left. The car was undoubtedly moving more slowly; he could swear to it.

"I believe it is an established fact that the cow is not carnivorous," he observed, peering in spirit to the limits of the field and wondering if he could turn in case a stone wall threatened.

"I am going to jump," she announced quietly, and a spasm of fear shot through him remembering the pointed stubble and the flinty rocks.

67 "Listen," he commanded, "and try not to be a little idiot. What harm can a cow do you? Or if it could"--with a burst of inspiration--"why should you throw yourself into the middle of them--perhaps with a broken leg?"

A smothered gasp told him that this shot had told, and he drove on grimly; the nearly obliterated track led straight into the nibbling herd. As the monstrous, labouring chariot neared them they lifted their heads, stared gloomily a moment, and lumbered off, herding into a clumsy canter as the unknown enemy gained on them. Stunted firs rose here and there beside the track; the wheels crushed the smaller stumps now, and tipped more alarmingly as they took the unavoidable stones. They two might have been the first (or last) of human pairs in all the world, for they rode utterly alone between the dun earth and the blue sky. Each moment Antony expected to wake, gripping the sheets, and each moment this dreamlike progress, this mad chase of dappled cows, this pitching, tossing, clangorous flight, grew more real, more ludicrous, more menacing.

Suddenly the path grew smoother; even, it seemed to Antony, more slippery. The wheels took a different motion, the noise of 68 machinery grew by tiny degrees less and lower and died into a drone. It almost seemed that they were gliding with the force of gravity alone, for the track (now a broad muddy band) dipped slightly but steadily. They appeared to be bound for a providential gap in an ugly stone wall; below this stretched a wonderfully green field bounded by a thick row of feathery sage-coloured trees, the first full foliage they had seen.

Drugged with the steady head-wind of their flight, his hands mechanically glued to the wheel, his brain a mere phonograph that sang, over and over, "Keep in the track! Keep In the track!" Antony took his juggernaut through the scant six feet in the wall, marked how those of the cattle that had crowded through the opening made for the thinnest place in the fringe of trees, tried to estimate the force of a collision with one of those gnarled and twisted trunks, and realised to his horror that all power of initiative was exhausted in him. Helpless and hypnotised, fatalistic as a wild-riding Arab, he could only sit and grasp the wheel and wonder vaguely what would happen. Would she jump? He was practically certain that the motive-power was completely or nearly 69 exhausted, and that they were slipping along on a different and sloping soil. Even as this flashed through his mind he saw a welcome gap in the sage-green trees and made for it, though in doing so he left the path, which, for that matter, split inexplicably into many tiny paths.

What was that behind the green? What fields or walls or trees are blue? What blue shimmers and sparkles? . . .

"Jump! Jump!" he cried, hoarsely, but she sat fascinated, turned to stone by his side.

As one watches the water in a globe of coloured glass by the seashore and smiles at the tiny splashing mites that sport in it, so Antony watched a large red-and-white cow stagger helplessly down a steepish slope, and smiled as she plunged clumsily into the broad river. "It is beyond her depth, for she is swimming," he thought, and then they hung for three seconds on the brink of the tiny slope, a maddening three seconds, in which they might have jumped, but could not--and plunged, with a sharp, sweet scream from the rigid girl by his side, into the river. It rose up strangely, as it seemed, to meet them, and with the cold shock of the water 70 Antony's will returned to him, and he rolled over the side of the car before it was quite submerged, dragging Nette with him, and pitching her over beyond him with his left arm. She slipped from his grasp by the very force of the movement and went down, and the current caught them both.

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