Page:Jackson Gregory--joyous trouble maker.djvu/331



OR Beatrice Corliss a night of horror, for Joe Embry the supreme endeavour and final treachery. The treachery of a man builded upon the treachery of a woman of the Mrs. Denham ilk, a structure which might stand or might totter and fall, as fate willed it.

Beatrice had known what it was to feel rude hands upon her, to have a terrified outcry stifled in her throat, to see vague threatening shapes struggling about her in the darkness where she had gone with Embry, to watch Embry go down under those struggling forms, to wonder breathlessly if he had been killed, then to feel herself lifted bodily in a pair of strong arms and carried at a run down the graded roadway and flung unceremoniously into a waiting automobile. Only two connected sentences had she heard the whole while: a muttered, "Easy with her, Steele!" when she had been swept clear of the ground; a sharp, "Go ahead!" when she was bundled into the car.

So this again was the work of Bill Steele! That was her first clear thought through the murk of frightened anger. Was the man mad? Were there no limits to his lawless desperation? Did he think that in a day like today there was scope for the reckless play which this attack spelled?

In front of her a man sat stooped over his wheel, 315