Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/309

 He stood once more studying her with his impersonal and abstracted eyes.

"Could you run a motor, a track-motor like this?" he asked, with a side-jerk of his head toward the pier.

"I have run one, often," was her quiet answer. "There is no steering-wheel. It is simply a starting and speed-lever and the brakes—though we always took a boy, to blow, to keep the tracks clear!"

"The boy will not be needed, to-night," was his grim rejoinder, as he once more studied his watch. She drew back from him, slowly, step by step, aghast.

"You are not going to try to take that motor from them?" she asked.

"We've got to take that motor. It's our only way out. And with your help I can do it."

"But these sentries! And there are ﬁve men! And forty-eight miles of country held by De Brigard!"

"Listen," he said, so simply, so matter-of-fact in the facing of the problem, that his very quietness brought her stampeding thoughts back to her. "There are just two danger-zones. The ﬁrst is in the weigh-scales shed, where those ﬁve men will be. The second will be in De Brigard's lines."