spin out to somewhere that’s cool, and we’ll order cold things to eat, and cold things to drink, and you can talk about yourself till you’re tired. You’ll have to take it out on somebody, an’ it might as well be me.”
Five minutes later, with my hat in my hand, I turned to find Peter at my elbow.
“Want to talk to you,” he said, frowning.
“Sorry, Peter, but I can’t stop. Won’t it do later?”
“No. Got an assignment? I’ll go with you.”
“N-not exactly, Peter. The truth is, Blackie has taken pity on me and has promised to take me out for a spin, just to cool off. It has been so insufferably hot.”
Peter turned away. “Count me in on that,” he said, over his shoulder.
“But I can’t, Peter,” I cried. “It isn’t my party. And anyway—”
Peter turned around, and there was an ugly glow in his eyes and an ugly look on his face, and a little red ridge that I had not noticed before seemed to burn itself across his forehead. “And anyway, you don’t want me, eh? Well, I’m going. I’m not going to have my wife chasing all over the country with strange men. Remember, you’re not the giddy grass widdy you used to be. You can take me, or stay at home, understand?”
His voice was high-pitched and quavering. Something in his manner struck a vague terror to my heart. “Why, Peter, if you care that much I shall be glad to have you go. So will Blackie, I am sure. Come, we’ll go down now. He’ll be waiting for us.”
Blackie’s keen, clever mind grasped the situation as soon as he saw us together. His dark face was illumined by one of his rare smiles. “Coming with us, Orme? Do you good. Pile into the tonneau, you two, and hang on to your hair. I’m going to smash the law.”
Peter sauntered up to the steering-wheel. “Let me drive,” he said. “I’m not bad at it.”
“Nix with the artless amateur,” returned Blackie. “This ain’t no demonstration car. I drive my own little wagon when I go riding, and I intend to until I take my last ride, feet first.”
Peter muttered something surly and climbed into the front seat next to Blackie, leaving me to occupy the tonneau in solitary state.
Peter began to ask questions—dozens of them, which Blackie answered, patiently and fully. I could not hear all that they said, but I saw that Peter was urging Blackie to greater speed, and that Blackie was explaining that he must first leave the crowded streets behind. Suddenly Peter made a gesture in the direction of the wheel, and said something in a high, sharp voice. Blackie’s answer was quick and decidedly in the negative. The next instant Peter Orme rose in his place and leaning forward and upward, grasped the wheel that was in Blackie’s hands. The car swerved sickeningly. I noticed, dully, that Blackie did not go white as novelists say men do in moments of horror. A dull red flush crept to the very base of his neck. With a twist of his frail body he tried to throw off Peter’s hands. I remember leaning over the back of the seat and trying to pull Peter back as I realized that it was a madman with whom we were dealing. Nothing seemed real. It was ridiculously like the things one sees in the moving picture theaters. I felt no fear.
“Sit down, Orme!” Blackie yelled. “You’ll ditch us! Dawn! God!—”
We shot down a little hill. Two wheels were lifted from the ground. The machine was poised in the air for a second before it crashed into the ditch and turned over completely, throwing me clear, but burying Blackie and Peter under its weight of steel and wood and whirring wheels.
I remember rising from the ground, and sinking back again and rising once more to run forward to where the car lay in the ditch, and tugging at that great frame of steel with crazy, futile fingers. Then I ran screaming down the road toward a man who was tranquilly working in a field nearby.
CHAPTER XX
BLACKIE’S VACATION COMES
The shabby blue office coat hangs on the hook in the little sporting room where Blackie placed it. No one dreams of moving it. There it dangles, out at elbows, disreputable, its pockets burned from many a hot pipe thrust carelessly into them, its cuffs frayed, its lapels bearing the marks of cigarette, paste-pot and pen.
It is that faded old garment, more than anything else, which makes us fail to realize that its owner will never again slip into its comfortable folds. We cannot believe that a lifeless rag like that can triumph over the man of flesh and blood and nerves and sympathies. With what contempt do we look upon those garments during our lifetime! And how they live on, defying time, long, long after we have been gathered to our last rest.
In some miraculous manner Blackie had lived on for two days after that ghastly ride. Peter had been killed instantly, the doctors said. They gave no hope for Blackie. My escape with but a few ridiculous bruises and scratches was due, they said, to the fact that I had sat in the tonneau. I heard them all, in a stupor of horror and grief, and wondered what plan Fate had in store for me, that I alone should have been spared. Norah and Max came, and took things in charge, and I saw Von Gerhard, but all three appeared dim and shadowy, like figures in a mist. When I closed my eyes I could see Peter’s tense figure bending over Blackie at the wheel, and heard his labored breathing as he struggled in his mad fury, and felt again the helpless horror that had come to me as we swerved off the road and into the ditch below, with Blackie, rigid and desperate, still clinging to the wheel. I lived it all over and over in my mind. In the midst of the blackness I heard a sentence that cleared the fog from my mind, and caused me to raise myself from my pillows.
Some one—Norah, I think—had said that Blackie was conscious, and that he was asking for some of the men at the office, and for me. For me! I rose and dressed, in spite of Norah’s protests. I was quite well, I told them. I must see him. I shook them off with trembling fingers and when they saw that I was quite determined they gave in, and Von Gerhard telephoned to the hospital to learn the hour at which I might meet the others who were to see Blackie for a brief moment.
I met them in the stiff little waiting room of he hospital—Norberg, Deming, Schmidt, Holt—men who had known him from the time when they had yelled, “Heh, boy!” at him when they wanted their pencils sharpened. Awkwardly we followed the fleet-footed nurse who glided ahead of us down the wide hospital corridors, past doorways through which we caught glimpses of white beds that were no whiter than the faces that lay on the pillows. We came at last into a very still and bright little room where Blackie lay.
Had years passed over his head since I saw him last? The face that tried to smile at us from the pillow was strangely wizened and old. It was as though a withering blight had touched it. Only the eyes were the same. They glowed in the sunken face, beneath the shock of black hair, with a startling luster and brilliancy.
