Page:A M Williamson - The Motor Maid.djvu/284

268 blanket, then a thick quilt of down, and the motor began to pant. The winds seemed to come from all ways at once, shrieking like witches, and flinging their splinters of ice, fine and small as broken needles, against our cheeks. Still I would not go inside. I could not bear to be warm and comfortable while Jack faced the cold alone. I knew his fingers must be stiff, though he would n't confess to any suffering, and I wished that I knew how to drive the car, so that we might have taken turns, sitting with our hands in our pockets.

In the deepening snow we moved slowly, the wheels slipping now and then, unable to grip. Then, on a steep incline, there came a report like a revolver shot. But it did n't frighten me now. I knew it meant a collapsed tyre, not a concealed murderer; but there could n't have been a much worse place for "jacking up." Nevertheless, it 's an ill tyre that blows up for its own good alone, and the forty minutes out of a waning afternoon made the chauffeur's cold hands hot and the hot engine cold.

Starting on again, we had ten miles of desolation, then a tiny hamlet which seemed only to emphasize that desolation; again another ten-mile stretch of desert, and another hamlet; here and there a glimpse of the railway-line, like a great black snake, lost in the snow; now and then the gilded picture of an ancient town, crowning some tall crag that stood up from the flat plain below like a giant bottle. And there was one thrilling view of a high viaduct, flinging a spider's web of glittering steel across a vast and shadowy ravine. "Garabit!" said the chauffeur, as he saw it; and I remembered that this road was not