Page:Arthur Stranger--The Stranger.djvu/7



HERE was a shout of alarm, a scream of brakes hard down, and a cloud of dust as the heavy motor-car slithered to a stop.

"I hit 'em!" gasped John Hardy, with a shake in his knees as he sat gripping the wheel and staring back over his shoulder. Then, with a sinking of the midriff, he leaned over the car-side and looked at his running-board. He looked at it as though he expected to see shreds of flesh hanging from its metalled edges.

But he could see nothing, nothing on the running-board and nothing on the road itself. Yet something was wrong with his eyes, or with his nerves that morning, for he had misjudged both his speed and his distances as that strange looking vehicle had come with ghost-like quietness about the turn in the road. The whole thing, indeed, had struck him as a bit fantastic, as a bit incredible, like a spectacle carpentered together for a motion-picture camera: the sombre grey team with their sombre trappings, the ancient-looking with the two cockaded figures on the driving-seat, the solitary passenger in his solemn-looking military cape and the three-cornered black hat that shadowed a grey face with a far-away look in the eyes. It puzzled John Hardy. His Klaxon-horn had, apparently, been unheard, just as his shout had been ignored. And the fools had turned out to the left, instead of to the right. So as he ducked for his emergency-brake and stiffened in his seat he knew that the collision was inevitable. He had not actually seen it, misted as his vision must have been with road-dust and sudden panic. But as he sat there, grey-jowled and shaken, waiting for the Unknown to disclose itself, his eye fell on a brown pocketbook within ten feet of his car.

He clambered down from his seat and picked it up. Instead of being a pocketbook, however, it was a much-thumbed volume of faded calf-skin. But he looked up from the faded pages, which he was able to make out as a copy of Grey's "Elegy," to see a figure emerging through the dust-cloud which still hung over the road. It was the same figure that he had seen in the barouche, only now