Page:Edgar Wallace - The Green Rust.djvu/248

244 "What does it mean? " asked the editor, "why is everybody buying wheat so frantically? There is no shortage. The harvests in the United States and Canada are good."

"There will be no harvests," said Beale solemnly; and the journalist gaped at him.

R. VAN HEERDEN expected many things and was prepared for contingencies beyond the imagination of the normally minded, but he was not prepared to find in Oliva Cresswell a pleasant travelling-companion. When a man takes a girl, against her will, from a pleasant suite at the best hotel in London, compels her at the peril of death to accompany him on a motor-car ride in the dead of the night, and when his offence is a duplication of one which had been committed less than a week before, he not unnaturally anticipates tears, supplications, or in the alternative a frigid and unapproachable silence.

To his amazement Oliva was extraordinarily cheerful and talkative and even amusing. He had kept Bridgers at the door of the car whilst he investigated the pawn-broking establishment of Messrs. Rosenblaum Bros., and had returned in triumph to discover that the girl who up to then had been taciturn and uncommunicative was in quite an amiable mood.

"I used to think," she said, "that motor-car abductions were the invention of sensational writers, but you seem to make a practice of it. You are not very original, Dr. van Heerden. I think I've told you that before."

He smiled in the darkness as the car sped smoothly through the deserted streets.

"I must plead guilty to being rather unoriginal," he said, "but I promise you that this little adventure shall not end as did the last."