Alias the Lone Wolf Part 36

In sudden blindness the car moved on slowly, groping its way for a few hundred yards. Then Jules picked out the mouth of a narrow lane, overshadowed by dense foliage, ran past, stopped, and backed into it.

In four minutes by Lanyard's watch the pulse of the limousine began to beat upon the stillness of that sleepy countryside. A blue-white glare like naked and hungry steel leapt quivering past the bend, swept in a wide arc as the lamps themselves became visible, and lay horizontal with the road as the car bored past.

"Evidently Leon feels quite lost without us," Lanyard commented.

"Shoot, Jules--follow his rear lamp, and _don't_ cut out your m.u.f.fler.

Can you manage without headlights for a while?"

"I drove an ambulance for four years, sir."

The car swung out into the main highway. Far ahead the red sardonic eye in the rear of the limousine leered as if mocking their hopes of keeping it in sight. Jules, however, proved unresentful; and he was marvellously competent.

"To anybody who's ever piloted a load of casualties through eighteen inches of mud, dodging sh.e.l.l holes and sh.e.l.ls on their way to make new holes, in a black rainstorm at midnight--this sort of thing," Jules announced--"a hard, smooth road under a clear sky--is simple pie."

So it may have seemed to him. But to Lanyard and Liane Delorme, hurled along a road they could not see at anywhere from forty to sixty miles an hour, with no manner of guidance other than an elusive tail-lamp which was forever whisking round corners and remaining invisible till Jules found his way round in turn, by instinct or second sight or intuition--whatever it was, it proved unfailing--it was a nervous time.

And there was half an hour of it...

They were swooping down a long grade with a sharp turn at the bottom, as they knew from the fact that the red eye had just winked out, somewhere on ahead, there sounded a grinding crash, the noise of a stout fabric rent and crushed with the clash and clatter of s.h.i.+vered gla.s.s.

"Easy," Lanyard cautioned--"and ready with the lights!"

Both warnings were superfluous. Jules had already disengaged the gears.

Gravity carried the car round the curve, slowly, smoothly, silently; under constraint of its brakes it slid to a pause on a steep though brief descent, and hung there like an animal poised to spring, purring softly.

Below, at the foot of the hill, the headlights of another car, standing at some distance and to the right of the road, furnished lurid illumination to the theatre of disaster.

Something, its nature just then mysterious, had apparently caused Leon to lose control of the heavy car, so that it had skidded into a ditch and capsized. Four men, crude shapes of nightmare in enveloping dust-coats and disfiguring goggles, were swarming round the wreck. Two were helping the driver out, two others having their gallantry in performing like service for the maid rewarded by a torrent of vituperative denunciation, half hysterical and wholly infuriated.

By the freedom of her gestures, which was rivalled only by that of her language, the dishevelled, storming figure of Marthe was manifestly uninjured. And in another moment it was seen, as Leon found his feet and limped toward the others, that he had suffered only slight damage at the worst.

Lanyard drew attention to a dark serpentine line that lay like a dead snake upon the lighted surface of the road. Jules grunted in token of comprehension. Liane Delorme breathlessly demanded: "What is it?"

"An old trick," Lanyard explained: "A wire cable stretched between trees diagonally across the road, about as high as the middle of the winds.h.i.+eld. The impetus of the limousine broke it, but not before it had slewed the car off toward the ditch, wrenching the wheel out of the driver's hands."

He fondled the pistol which Jules had handed him, slipped the safety catch, and said: "Now before they wake up, Jules--give her all she's got!"

Jules released the brakes and, as the car gathered way, noiselessly slipped the gear s.h.i.+ft into the fourth speed and bore heavily on the accelerator. They were making forty miles an hour when they struck the level and thundered past the group.

A glimpse of startled faces, the scream of a man who had strayed incautiously into the roadway and stopped there, apparently petrified by the peril that bore down upon him without lights or any other warning, until one of the forward fenders struck and hurled him aside like a straw--and only the night of the open road lay before them.

Jules touched the headlight switch and opened the exhaust. Above the roaring of the latter Lanyard fancied he could hear a faint rattling sound. He looked back and smiled grimly. Sharp, short flames of orange and scarlet were stabbing the darkness. Somebody had opened fire with an automatic pistol.... Sheer waste of ammunition!

The pace waxed terrific on a road, like so many roads of France, apparently interminable and straight. On either hand endless ranks of poplars rattled like loose palings of some tremendous picket fence. And yet, long before the road turned, Lanyard, staring astern as he knelt on the rear seat with arms crossed on the folded top, saw the two white eyes of the grey car swing into view and start in pursuit. Quick work, he called it.

He crawled forward and communicated his news, shouting to make himself heard.

"Don't ease up unless you have to," he counselled; "don't think we dare give them an inch."

Back at his post of observation, he watched, hoping against hope, while the car lunged and tore like a mad thing through the night, snoring up grades, screaming down them, drumming across the levels, clattering wildly through villages and hamlets; while the moon rose and gathered strength and made the road a streaming river of milk and ink; while his heart sank as minute succeeded minute, mile followed mile, and ever the lights of the pursuing car, lost to sight from time to time, reappeared with a brighter, fiercer glow, and conviction forced itself home that they were being gradually but surely overhauled.

He took this intelligence to the ear of Jules. The chauffeur answered only with a worried shake of his head that said too plainly he was doing his best, extracting every ounce of power from the engine.

Ill luck ambushed them in the streets of a sizable town, its name unknown to Lanyard, where another car, driven inexpertly, rolled out of a side street and stalled in their path. The emergency brake saved them a collision; but there were not six inches between the two when the touring car stopped dead; and minutes were lost before the other got under way and they were able to proceed.

Less than three hundred yards separated pursued and pursuer as they raced out through open fields once more. And foot by foot this lead was being inexorably cut down.

In the seat beside the driver of the grey car a man rose and, steadying himself by holding onto the winds.h.i.+eld, poured out the contents of an automatic, presumably hoping to puncture the tires of the quarry. A bullet bored a neat hole through the winds.h.i.+eld between the heads of Liane Delorme and Jules. The woman slipped down upon the floor and Jules crouched over the wheel. Lanyard fingered his automatic but held its fire against a moment when he could be more sure of his arm.

Instead, he turned to the lunch hamper and opened it. Liane's provisioning had been ample for a party thrice their number. In the bottom of the basket lay six pint bottles of champagne, four of them unopened. Lanyard took them to the rear seat--and found the grey car had drawn up to within fifty yards of its prey. Making a pace better than seventy miles per hour, it would not dare swerve.

The first empty bottle broke to one side, the second squarely between the front wheels. He grasped the first full bottle by the neck and felt that its weight promised more accuracy, but ducked before attempting to throw it as a volley of shots sought to discourage him. At the first lull he rose and cast the bottle with the overhand action employed in grenade throwing. It crashed fairly beneath the nearer forward wheel of the grey car, but without effect, other than to draw another volley in retaliation. This he risked; the emergency had grown too desperate for more paltering; the lead had been abridged to thirty yards; in two minutes more it would be nothing.

The fourth bottle went wild, but the fifth exploded six inches in front of the offside wheel and its jagged fragments ripped out the heart of the tire. On the instant of the accompanying blow-out the grey car s.h.i.+ed like a frightened horse and swerved off the road, hurtling headlong into a clump of trees. The subsequent crash was like the detonation of a great bomb. Deep shadows masked that tragedy beneath the trees. Lanyard saw the beam of the headlights lift and drill perpendicularly into the zenith before it was blacked out.

He turned and yelled in the ear of Jules: "Slow down! Take your time!

They've quit!"

Liane Delorme rose from her cramped position on the floor, and stared incredulously back along the empty, moonlit road.

"What has become of them?"

Lanyard offered a vague gesture."... tried to climb a tree," he replied wearily, and dropping back on the rear seat began to worry the cork out of the last pint bottle of champagne.

He reckoned he had earned a drink if anybody ever had.

XX

THE SYBARITES

Without disclaiming any credit that was rightly his due for making the performance possible, Lanyard felt obliged to concede that Liane's Delorme's confidence had been well reposed in the ability of Jules to drive by the clock. For when the touring car made, on a quayside of Cherbourg's avant port, what was for its pa.s.sengers its last stop of the night, the hour of eight bells was being sounded aboard the countless vessels that shouldered one another in the twin basins of the commercial harbour or rode at anchor between its granite jetties and the distant bulwark of the Digue.

Nor was Jules disposed to deny himself well-earned applause. Receiving none immediately when he got down from his seat and indulged in one luxurious stretch, "I'll disseminate the information to the terrestrial universe," he volunteered, "that was travelling!"

"And now that you have done so," Liane Delorme suggested, "perhaps you will be good enough to let the stewards know we are waiting."

If the grin was impudent, the salute she got in acknowledgment was perfection; Jules faced about like a military automaton, strode off briskly, stopped at some distance to light a cigarette, and in effect faded out with the flame of the match.

Lanyard didn't try to keep track of his going. Committed as he stood to follow the lead of Liane Delorme to the end of this chapter of intrigue (and with his mind at ease as to Monsieur Dupont, for the time being at least) he was largely indifferent to intervening developments.

He had asked no questions of Liane, and his knowledge of Cherbourg was limited to a memory of pa.s.sing through the place as a boy, with a case-hardened criminal as guide and police at their heels. But a.s.suming that Liane had booked pa.s.sages for New York by a Cunarder, a White Star or American Line Boat--all three touched regularly at Cherbourg, west bound from Southampton--he expected presently to go aboard a tender and be ferried out to one of the steamers whose riding lights were to be seen in the roadstead. Meanwhile he was lazily content....

Mellow voices of bell metal swelled and died on the midnight air while, lounging against the motor car--with Liane at his side registering more impatience than he thought the occasion called for--Lanyard listened, stared, wondered, the breath of the sea sweet in his nostrils, its flavour in his throat, his vision lost in the tangled web of masts and cordage and funnels that stencilled the moon-pale sky: the witching glamour of salt water binding all his senses with its time-old spell.

It was quiet there upon the quay. Somewhere a winch rattled drowsily and weary tackle whined; more near at hand, funnels were snoring and pumps chugging with a constant, monotonous noise of splas.h.i.+ng. On the landward side, from wine shops across the way, came blurred gusts of laughter and the wailing of an accordeon. The footfalls of a watchman, or perhaps a sergent de ville, had lonely echoes. The high electric arcs were motionless, and the shadows cast by their steel-blue glare lay on the pave as if painted in lampblack.

Dupont, the road to Paris, seemed figments of some dream dreamed long ago...