Page:Jackson Gregory--joyous trouble maker.djvu/26

10 last of the Corliss blood, a heavy motor veil trailing behind her.

A merry twinkle came into Steele's eyes, his lips shaped themselves to a broadening grin.

"By all accounts," he confided in the pipe whose ashes he at last knocked out, "we have the honour of witnessing the return of the Young Queen!"

The red car sped up the valley, was lost to view behind a clump of poplars, reappeared seeming to have achieved ever greater momentum, swept about a turn in a manner to make the man who watched lift his brows, rumbled across a high arched bridge, and with motor drumming shot up the first stage of the graded roadway, again losing itself as a shoulder of the mountain intervened.

Steele rose to his feet expectantly. Booth Stanton had come out of his cabin and walked swiftly toward the courtyard. Bradford came out of the house and, his whole immaculate being breathing respectful and solicitous servitude, stood at the foot of the granite steps like a queen's musketeer. A bell tinkled somewhere in the house and after it came hurrying footsteps. Two men servants appeared and stood at stiff attention a half dozen paces from Bradford's black coated back. Another bell tinkled and still another.

"The Young Queen!" chuckled Steele.

The red car had appeared, rising to the level of the small tableland, spurted forward with level road under its spinning wheels, flashed into the open court, accomplished the semicircular half turn and stopped at the steps, avoiding a smash-up by half a dozen inches.