  Lanyard took back to Eve by the fire the most dÉgagÉ manner he could manage, a manner of leisured good humour that wasn't all put on at the prompting of amour propre, that was assumed less in hope of hoodwinking her ingenious intuitions than for the benefit of their fellow guests, if so be it these entertained any latent interest in the reactions of Michael Lanyard to a long distance call for "Monsieur Paul Martin," and that dissembled better than he believed a sense of discouragement the most devastating he had ever known—not on his account alone so much as that he was not alone. The quandary in which he found himself trapped, now that his eyes had been opened by that singular admonition from out of the night, at once cryptic and only too intelligible, was one that defied and, what was worse, promised persistent defiance to the utmost of his resources, from which extrication with credit to himself—or, if it came to that, with his life—seemed out of the question. Not that he put life first: his solicitude was nine parts unselfish, his disheartenment the fruit of inability to hit on any pretext that conceivably would induce Eve to part then and there with one whose company had all at once become equivalent to a pistol trained on her heart point-blank—and with a finger both pitiless and anonymous trembling on the trigger. A strong statement, but one that by no means painted their predicament an exaggerated black. His "sister" had never played her confrÈres false or resorted to subterfuge so subtle to put "Monsieur Paul Martin" on his guard against a nebulous or trifling menace. Liane owed Lanyard much on an old score, she would have been faithless to the code of her kind had she, having definite foreknowledge of it, permitted so good a friend to go blindly to meet the fate prepared for him, whatever that might be; such women are nevertheless jealous wardens of their own welfare, it had required perception of a peril to Lanyard immediate and desperate to work Liane up to the point of chancing the resentment of Morphew should her treachery ever transpire. Witness the extravagant pains she had taken to disguise her hand. No: it would never do to underprize this proof of good will or to read in Liane's warning any spirit but one of the most earnest anxiety. Taken as she had unquestionably intended it, her "prenez-garde" decoded somewhat to this effect: "You are sadly self-deluded, my friend, if you think Morphew resigned to stomach defeat at your hands, or that you have succeeded in keeping your movements hidden from him. He has never for an instant lost sight either of you or of his revenge, he is playing you as heartlessly as an angler plays a trout, gaff in hand—you must go warily to cheat its barbs." The dilemma thus exposed was appalling: a clean breast of all he had been trying to hide from her was unavoidable if he hoped to make Eve comprehend why he held it imperative for them to seek each a separate way back to New York; whereas, once she did grasp the fact that danger threatened him, she would surely refuse to let him risk it alone. Women of her rare stamp are never readily dismayed or disposed to think first of themselves if physical peril frown also upon one by whom their affections have been engaged. . . . Regard the spirit that poised Eve then in that juncture, awaiting his return with a countenance as composed as it was fair, with eyes unclouded by any confession of impatience or misgivings. "Sorry I was so long," Lanyard said with intention to be heard across the dining-room. "I stopped to pay the bill and order the car brought round. If you don't mind . . ." "It's quite time," Eve amiably agreed—"if we're to get home at any respectable hour." He resumed his chair before the fire and utilized his cigarette case and a match to cover sidelong study of the four who had come in so soon after his arrival with Eve, and who remained still at table, dawdling with dessert. But he couldn't see that his announcement had meant anything to these . . . The one woman of their number was a creature of strapping comeliness whose hail-fellow swagger was brazen that had been piquant in the flapper she heavily aped; while the men were such as would hardly have won a second glance on any ordinary occasion, types of the American bourgeois case-hardened by "good business," clothed in a weirdly uniform mode of smartness, something stale with over-feeding and drinking and fondling, wanting stimulation yet inclined to grow causelessly arrogant in their cups. But Lanyard was too well learned in the ways of urban America not to know that its Apaches seldom if ever conform to the clichÉ of the cinema when it turns its cyclopÆdic if gullible eye on what it knows as denizens of the underworld. The gunman of New York is blown with pride of caste; for all that he isn't keen on bidding for the attention of the police by sporting the conventionalized make-up of a suspicious character, he far prefers to pass in a crowd as a simple man in the street normally addicted to the machine-made "clothing of distinction" of the magazine advertisements. The fact, then, that these three were apparently nobodies in particular minding their own business, didn't necessarily mean that Lanyard could afford to dismiss them from his calculations. Neither did he, careful though he was to give them no excuse for suspecting he had one thought to spare from the woman at his side. "There is no one like you," he was saying in gallant repayment of her steadfast and demanding attention: "the loveliest woman that ever breathed, the most adorably patient . . ." "How little you know me!" she calmly commented—"at least, if you expect me to believe you think me patient. Then your message was important?" "Very," the man admitted: the time was by when fencing were anything but waste of time. "I am worried about getting you back to Town . . ." "So it was Mademoiselle Delorme!" "That only goes to show," Lanyard obliquely remarked, "one should never tell you anything one expects you to forget." "I have forgotten nothing you have ever told me about yourself—nothing, least of all, that had to do with another woman's affection for you." "Yet you are incapable of jealousy." "Still, I am very greedy, I don't like sharing even the least of your thoughts with any other woman." "Oh!" he laughed—"but Liane isn't a woman, except professionally." "You are tantalizing me all the same when you don't tell me what she had to say—and how in Heaven's name she guessed you were dining here—and why she resurrected that old nom de guerre instead of calling for you by your right name." "I'm afraid Liane didn't guess, I suspect somebody told her we had stopped here to dine—" The teasing half-smile with which Eve had been regarding her lover was erased. "You think we were followed—!" "How else could they have known?" "'They'?" "Who informed Liane." "But why should she have harked back to 'Paul Martin'?" "I fancy her reason for that is implicit in Liane's message, a brief one—delivered, if it matters, by a stranger's tongue—'prenez garde'." Eve nodded thoughtful confirmation of a private conjecture. "You are in some danger?" Not at all deceived by the shrug that sought to depreciate the weight of that term, she glanced quickly to and from the little party that was, just then, noisily making merry at its table across the room. In response, another movement of Lanyard's shoulders disclaimed intelligence: "Perhaps . . . Who knows?" "You must tell me everything . . ." "I know; but it's a fairish yarn, and the car ought to be here any minute—I'll hardly have time before we leave. So let me first of all throw myself upon your mercy, Eve, beg you to trust me." "But you know I do, in every way." "I mean: trust me to know what is best . . ." Analysis of this ambiguity knitted a speculative frown. "You're going to ask something of me I won't want to do." "It is dangerous for us to attempt the journey back to New York together." "Dangerous," Eve objected, "isn't definite enough." "It would appear that one whom I have recently been obliged to humiliate plans to pay me out tonight. He will fail—trust me for that—but I shall be more free to make him see the error of his ways if I can feel sure the harm meant for me can't by mischance be visited upon you instead." "Ah, no, my friend! you don't seriously think I will consent . . ." "You would not hesitate if I could only make it clear how much better my chances would be." "I'm afraid it's a hopeless task, but"—she made her smile provoking—"suppose you try." "Conceive, then"—Lanyard spoke deliberately in an endeavour to put the business in a nutshell—"that after leaving you night before last I was thrown in with one who chose to declare war on me for his own ends—" "The Sultan of Loot!" "Why try to keep anything from you?" "You forget, I too had a premonition concerning that creature. Who is he?" "I can more easily tell you what he is. He styles himself Morphew and the Tenderloin calls him King of the Bootleggers—justly, one is told. In addition, he nurses a penchant for having a finger in every lawless pie. To discipline me, that night, he caused the loot of a burglary to be hidden in my pockets while I lay in a stupor, drugged by his direction, then saw to it that I was suspected of having committed the theft." "Oh, no!" the woman interrupted involuntarily, revolted by the bare suggestion of such enormity. "Or else—I must believe I stole the jewels myself, in instinctive reversion to old ways, drink having abolished the inhibitions of the new." "Never!" "I do not know," Lanyard confessed with a wry face. "There are circumstances which make me uneasy . . . I do not know!" "How can you even suggest such a thing?" "Let me tell you . . . Last night I visited—or revisited!—the house from which the jewels had been stolen, meaning secretly to restore them. This I managed. I was even more fortunate in being able to bring about the arrest of one of Morphew's lot as the burglar of fact—which the fellow may well have been. Finally, to confuse pursuit, I quitted the house by the way the burglar had taken the night before—let myself out of a window to the roof of an extension, dropped down to a backyard, scaled a board fence, and stole through an excavation for a new building to the street beyond. Eve . . ." Lanyard faltered and worked his hands together, his features wrung, haunted eyes reflecting the enigma of the embers which held their stare. And with a gesture of quick sympathy, the woman sat forward to screen him. But these others seemed to be completely preoccupied with their own hilarious concerns; and the racket of congenial voices they raised must have prevented their overhearing anything of Lanyard's confession when at length he resumed. "Up to that time," he said slowly, "I had hardly questioned the assumption that Morphew deliberately had schemed to victimize me . . . But then, while I was creeping away from that house, quite literally like a thief in the night—once upon the roof, again when I stood in the kitchen-yard, looking back at the blank rear windows, and yet again while stumbling through that foundation pit beyond the fence—at every stage of that journey I knew a feeling as of doing something I had done before, repeating the identical moves I had made at another time, upon an occasion strangely forgotten . . ." "Well?" the woman in cool amusement asked. "Well!"—his smile sketched a wistful expression of bewilderment—"I do not know, perhaps it was true, perhaps . . ." Careless whether they were observed, the woman leaned forward and lightly covered one of his hands with her own. "Poor dear!" she cried, with a thrill of fond laughter—"to let himself be so tormented by a sensation such as everybody has at times." "Everybody?" he iterated in a stare. "It happens to us all—has it never happened to you before?—a phenomenon so common the psychologists have a special name for it. What do they call it? reflex memory? Something of the sort, I forget . . . One only needs a new scene and a mood especially susceptible to impressions of strangeness or beauty—and all at once one feels quite sure one has visited that very spot in some previous existence. Precisely that happened to you, last night, my Michael, in your super-excited state of mind, worried by ignorance of the truth about the stolen property in your possession. . . . Take my word for it." "You believe that?" he insisted—"truly?" "Truly, my dear." "You don't think I could possibly—?" "Never—I know you better than you do yourself." Eve gave his hand a comforting pressure, and sat back. "If you let anything so absurd fret you another instant I shall be cross with you." "You make me happy," Lanyard said. "It costs me something to tell you . . ." "I know!" A DIABOLICAL SHADOW HERALDS THE APPROACH OF MORPHEW, KING OF LOOT."I don't deserve such faith." "But I don't consider you a good judge of your own worth, dear. And now that I understand the situation—you've made a fool and an enemy of this man Morphew, and he's conspiring to be revenged—tell me, what is it you have to propose about returning to Town?" "I want you to let me find my way back alone. I have consulted road-maps and time-tables posted in the office here. There's a train for New York from the nearest station"—Lanyard glanced at the watch on his wrist—"in about half an hour. . . . Which reminds me, your driver is taking his time." "Patience. He's always tinkering with the motor—he'll be ready any minute. You were saying—?" "I want you to let me drop you at the railroad and take the train back to Town, with your chauffeur for protection, while I go on in the car." Undisguised derision honoured this proposal. "But why should I, when it is you, not I, the Sultan of Loot is after? If the train can be considered safe, surely you're the one—" "You forget, Morphew's people will aim at your motor-car, believing me to be in it whether I am or not. If I should succeed in leaving it unobserved, they would still pursue the car. You can't ask me to expose you to a danger from which I turn tail." "Then why shouldn't we both take the train?" "It is what you American call an accomodation—stops at every station. If we should abandon your car to be found near the railroad, it would be too simple to have the train anticipated by telephone, boarded somewhere between here and New York, and the two of us kept so closely watched we would have no chance . . ." The woman's head described a sign of flat rejection——Lanyard's rueful recognition of an outcome foreseen. "Impossible, my friend. I couldn't dream of leaving you to shift for yourself." "But how else—?" "I have a saner scheme. Why not stop here for the night? The inn must have accomodations. . . . You see!" Eve cried in laughing triumph—"you are trying to get rid of me when the truth is, you need me. Two heads are better than one . . . But why shake yours so dourly?" "I am afraid of your plan for more reasons than one. Daylight for our return will hardly be the same thing as accident insurance. If you give me my choice, I like darkness better." "And your other reasons—?" "If I stop here overnight, where I am beyond much doubt under surveillance even now, I remain placed and give Morphew just so much more time to close his net round me. And nothing I know of makes this inn a sanctuary or guarantees the bona fides of the management." "You don't mean to say you think the people who run this place—!" "I have been taught to trust nobody at times like this. More than that, everybody knows most of these resorts in and about New York that openly flout the Prohibition Amendment are actively in league with if not actually owned by bootlegging interests. I will breathe more comfortably, I promise you, when—and if—we are permitted to go our way unhindered." "Oh, but surely you exaggerate!" "Possibly; it's not always a bad fault, by no means so bad as under-exaggeration when one's neck is concerned. However, it can't be long now before we know." Seeing their waiter approach, Lanyard got up and took Eve's wrap from the back of her chair. But the natural expectation of word that the brougham was at the door suffered a blight even before the man spoke, by reason of the odd look with which he saluted Lanyard. "Excuse me, Mr. Martin," he said with—or instinct was at fault—a tinge of mockery in his supple habit—"the manager's compliments, and he'd be much obliged if you'd step into the office a minute, he'd like to have a word with you." "Indeed? What does the good man want?" "If it's all the same to you, sir, it'd be better if you'd kindly talk with the boss." "About what?" "Well, sir," the waiter stammered—"I don't want to alarm the lady—something's happened." Lanyard looked to Eve with lifting brows. "If you will excuse me—" "I don't think I will," Eve cheerfully replied, rising. "And I don't in the least mind being alarmed. I'm coming along." With a formal bow of consent, Lanyard folded the wrap round her shoulders, then threw his coat over his arm and prepared to follow the waiter. But the latter was just then peremptorily hailed by the host of the remaining party with a demand for "the check"; so Lanyard and Eve proceeded to the little office unescorted, to find awaiting them a person of decent manners with an intelligent if at the moment somewhat harassed eye. There had been, he began, an unfortunate accident, he was more sorry than he could say that it had occurred in his establishment . . . "What sort of an accident?" Lanyard with a touch of asperity cut his apologies short. "If you and your lady don't mind stepping this way, I'll show you . . ." Ushered out to the night, they were conducted round the corner of the building to the space where, in the chilly glimmer of a belated moon, the brougham stood parked with one other motor-car, and, near the former, two men were stooping over something that rested motionless upon the packed earth, one of them focussing upon it the beam of an electric torch. Lanyard touched Eve's arm, recommending her to wait aside, and with the manager joined the group round the supine body of Eve's chauffeur. The man lay in a limp sprawl, his face in that uncompromising glare a congested crimson, mouth slack and drooling, half-closed lids showing only the whites of eyes rolled back, stertorous respiration fouling the sweet smell of the night—evidently no worse than dead drunk. "I just don't know how he worked it to get like this," the manager was protesting. "It's dead against our rules to sell hootch to chauffeurs, and I'll sack the bird responsible for this if I have to bounce the whole staff to get rid of him. But that isn't any comfort to you, I guess." "None," Lanyard curtly agreed. "He was all right as long's he was sittin' in the chowfers' dinin'-room," the man with the lamp volunteered—"you wouldn't have thought he'd had more'n a couple. But as soon as the cold air hit him he flopped like somebody'd crowned him. Funny . . ." "No doubt you find it so." "The only thing I can suggest, Mr. Martin," the manager put in, Lanyard thought too eagerly, "is to lend you somebody to drive you back to New York. Arthur here's a darn' good driver, knows all the roads like a book." "That's very good of you," Lanyard returned, with a warning eye for Eve. "We'll be glad to make it worth Arthur's while, for neither of us can drive or has even a general idea of the roads. But first"—the toe of his boot stirred the body—"we would like to be sure this poor fool will get proper attention. I daresay you can give him a room." "Of course, sir—and I'll 'phone for a doctor, if you say so, though I don't think that ought to be necessary. This isn't any case of wood-alcohol poisoning, there isn't a drop of bad liquor in the house—" "I'm sure there isn't. All the same, what he had must have been wicked stuff. If you don't mind having him carried indoors, I'll make an examination myself—I have a limited amount of medical knowledge." "You bet I will . . ." Directed by the speaker, the two underlings, with no noteworthy enthusiasm, surrendered the torch and their leisure, lifted the body of the drunkard by the legs and shoulders and, staggering with the weight of that inert lump, made crabwise progress toward the rear entrance to the inn, the manager following with the light while Lanyard turned back to Eve with a suggestion clearly articulated for the benefit of whatever ears might care to hear. "If you'll make yourself comfortable in the car, I promise I won't keep you waiting long." "Thank you," Eve equably returned. "I don't mind waiting, and I do want to be sure that poor boy is in no real danger." Lanyard offered Eve a hand, but the door he unlatched was one that admitted not to the car but to the front seat of the driver's right. "Quick!" he urged in an undertone, and when Eve was in place doubled round to the other side of the brougham. But the manager was not napping. "Here now!" he remonstrated, jolted out of his vocational urbanity, and came running back—"thought you said you couldn't—" The moonlight silvered something In his hand which might or might not have been the darkened torch, and which Lanyard could not afford to give the benefit of the doubt. Standing on the running-board, without the smallest compunction he planted a foot in the midriff of the man so forcibly that the latter dropped whatever it was he had been holding and, with a yelp, doubled up. Immediately settling into place behind the wheel, Lanyard released the emergency brake, with the result that the brougham, standing on a slight down-grade, began to move of its own weight even before he could locate the starting pedal. Muttering a prayer of thankfulness, he meshed the gears in third and swung the car into the down-hill road. At the same time the two who had been carrying the chauffeur let their senseless burden drop and started in pursuit. One tripped over some inequality in the ground and plunged to his knees. The other gained the running-board in a bound and aimed a blow at Lanyard's head. It went wide, and Lanyard's fist glanced upon the fellow's jaw with sufficient weight to dislodge him. Beating the air with frantic arms, he disappeared. Fumbling for the switch with one hand, with the other Lanyard steered for the maw of the road through the woods. For one more instant the inn, painted with pale lunar phosphorescence, stood out in bold relief against its background of blurred forest, while with the tail of his eye Lanyard saw its front door of a sudden release a stream of saffron light. Somebody shouted in profane astonishment, somebody stumbled out upon the veranda and pelted toward the parking space. Then, between two heartbeats, Lanyard solved the secret of headlights and ignition, and the brougham, momentum sharply hastened, swept on into the pillared tunnel through the pines. At first, hands that hadn't grasped a wheel in years had all they could do to hold the lurching fabric to a sharply declivitous and twisting path. Then the grade grew more moderate, the way less tortuous, and the car, obedient to its brakes, slipped gently past the fiery sign and turned its nose southwards on the highway. "Well done!" Eve applauded—"Oh, well done!" "Wait!" Lanyard prayed, with the man in mind who had sprinted from the lighted doorway toward the other car—"physical fact to the contrary notwithstanding, we're not out of the woods yet." His toe found the accelerator pedal, the motor responded with a mettlesome snort and a drumming drone that waxed apace, the car clove the night like a frightened cat . . . After a mile or so of fast going on a road whose wendings required for safe navigation a sure hand and eye, Lanyard felt confidence confirmed in his ability to handle the brougham with fair skill and extract from its motor the best it had to give. And when, before long, a rarely long stretch of straight road made a fair trial feasible, he coaxed the speedometer by degrees up to, then past the mark 50, without feeling that he was tempting fate. Toward the end of that dash, Eve, who had been keeping an eye on the road astern, reported it bare of pursuing headlights. "Do you mean to try for that railroad?" "No—not now, not since things have turned out as they have." "I am glad," she told him coolly. "This night is too lovely to be spoiled by travelling in a stuffy train." "Is it?" he queried in grim humour. "Do you not find it so, my Michael?" "I find it damnably dangerous." "And I find it, danger and all, divine." But Lanyard drove in an obsession of fatality . . . The road, a river of oxidized silver threading an upland world of purples and blacks in blended masses and ever and again opening up vistas of long valleys filled with mist like streams of milk, was a gauntlet of deadly perils. In the blue bowl of the sky it bleached the misshapen moon like a grinning devil-mask swung from side to side of the devious way. The vast stillness that dwelt upon the world beneath had a brooding effect as of beauty holding its breath in dread. Through that somehow abnormal hush the swaying bulk of the brougham bored like something wild of eye and mad with fear. The wind its flight created had an insane whine, and the incessant drum of its exhaust, echoing from hard smooth surfaces, was re-echoed by hills and woods and fields with a rumour as of tom-toms thrumming a bacchanal of death . . . But to the woman who loved Lanyard it was all divine . . . Summing up another survey of the road behind, she declared: "There is nothing. You have outwitted and distanced them." "Have I?" "Is there more to fear?" "But everything." "Even an open road?" "Who can say what may lie in wait for us round the next bend?" "What does it matter, so we go to meet it together?" Neither daring to take his eyes from the streaming road nor knowing how to answer her, Lanyard gave only a groan. "I fear nothing but to be parted from you. Promise we shall never part." He could not promise . . . "Michael!" the heartbreaking voice at his shoulder insisted—"why don't you answer me? Surely you can't still be thinking I will ever let you go?" He contrived to say, almost explosively: "But I must." "Ah, no, no! Michael, you couldn't hurt me so." "Is not tonight enough to prove to you no man who loved you truly could consent to expose you to such a life? It is my fate to love you too well . . ." What the woman said to that was lost in the blast of a tyre blown out on one of the front wheels. An instantaneous swerve toward a ditch by the roadside all but wrenched the wheel out of control and resulted in a wreck. As it was, frantic work averted that disaster by the slenderest of scrapes. With locked brakes the brougham skidded drunkenly and rolled to a halt broadside to a bluff over across from the ditch. With amazing self-command, Lanyard suffered never a syllable of a seething vocabulary to escape his lips as he unlatched the door and leaped down. An instant later Eve on her side alighted and came round to join him. Together, they contemplated in silence the ruptured tyre and the two good spares locked in their rack—and the key in the pocket of a chauffeur sleeping off his drink in the Inn of the Green Woods, fifteen miles or more away! From contemplation of this bad business, Lanyard turned to consider their position, and found it equally bad. The car stood, as far off the road as it could be, but nevertheless somewhat blocking its narrow width, on the waist of an S bend, with a hillside blinding the approach on one hand, a wilderness of young forest on the other. And even as the thought formed that it would be well to move on at once, headlights illuminated the curve ahead, then swung into view, and a car coming from the direction of New York bore down at nothing less than forty miles an hour. Lanyard had barely time to catch Eve by the arm and drag her out of its path, a maneuvre which took them both to the side of the road bordered by the ditch. Simultaneously the bellow of an unmuffled exhaust told of the approach of another car from the opposite direction. When Lanyard first saw it, it was less than a hundred feet distant, moving at a terrific rate—and running without lights! So that was why Eve had been able to detect no sign of pursuit . . . The first car, forced by the stationary brougham to sheer to the wrong side of the road, loosed upon the night a blare of frenzy. Through this penetrated Eve's wail of terror. Lanyard swung to her like a maniac, seized the woman and, exerting every ounce of his strength, caught her up bodily and flung her off the road, into the ditch. Too late to save himself . . . The moon, reeling in its blanched blue field, was a scimitar of white flame. It swooped down through the firmament as might the wrath of God. The world like a bomb exploded beneath his feet; a quivering mass of agony, he was hurled far and far into an everlasting abyss of night impenetrable . . . |
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