Page:A M Williamson - The Motor Maid.djvu/287

Rh "It does matter most infernally. Don't you know that you make no more than a featherweight of difference to the car?"

"I feel as if I weighed a thousand pounds, now."

"It's that snow!"

"No. It's you. Your crossness. I can't have people cross to me, on lonely mountains, just when I 'm trying to help them."

His glare of rage turned to a stare of surprise. "Cross? Do you think I was cross to you?"

"Yes. And you just stopped in time, or you would have been worse."

"Oh, I see," he said. "You thought that the 'epithet' was going to be invidious, did you?"

"Naturally."

"Well, it was n't. I—no, I won't say it! That would be the last folly. But—I was n't going to be cross. I can't have you think that, whatever happens. Now sit still and be good, while I push again."

I weighed no more than half the thousand pounds now, and the cannon ball had dissolved like a chocolate cream; but the car stood like a rock, fixed, immutable.

"There ought to be half a dozen of me," said the chauffeur. "Look here, little pal, there 's nothing else for it; I must trudge off to St. Flour and collect the missing five. Are you afraid to be left here alone?"

Of course I said no; but when he had disappeared, walking very fast, I thought of a large variety of horrors that might happen; almost everything, in fact, from an earthquake to a mad bull. As the sun leaned far down toward the west, the level red light lay like pools of blood