For perhaps the hundredth time I asked myself if I was dreaming; if this
person in a French disguise, speeding through the night with a blue-clad
German beside him,--a German suffering, by the way, from a headache,
the last stages of a nosebleed, and a pronounced dislike for me as the
agency responsible for his ailments,--was really Devereux Bayne. But the
air was cold on my face; a revolver pressed my side; I saw three set,
hard profiles. It was not a dream; it was a dash for safety. And it was
engineered by anxious, desperate men.
Blenheim, hunched over the steering wheel, had settled to his business.
Certainly his nerve was going; the mania for escape had caught him;
he took startling chances on his curves and turns. Still, he knew the
country, it seemed. We drove on, fast and furiously, by lanes, by
mere paths set among thickets, by narrow brushwood roads. Sometimes
we skirted the river, which shone silver in the moonlight, lined with
rushes. Again, we could see nothing but a roof of trees overhead.
We emerged into a wider road, and I became award of various noises; a
booming, clear and regular; the sound of voices; the rumbling of
many wheels.
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