Page:That Royle Girl (Balmer).pdf/309

 cartridge could finish one man; but he knew that each would not; he knew that the men in the other machine first would finish him and Neski and Joan Daisy, would kill them all together and leave their bodies to be found in the car in the field. He was become a witness, and soon would be a lifeless victim of one of those ferocious sallies of cold-blooded, merciless city savages who, though he had gathered evidence against them and tried to prosecute them, never had become quite credible to himself. Of course he well knew they existed; for they were named and pointed out, and he had seen the subjects of their ferocity—bodies shot through and through and flung upon a city street or kicked to the side of a country road or left in a car running wild until it crashed into something.

"Get down," he begged Joan Royle, though knowing it was no use in the end; but he had to do something to protect her, so he seized her and again pressed her to the floor as he heard crackling under the wheels and the car lurched deep, flinging sidewise, and did not right itself but went over.

Wood and glass and ice—though he did not recognize this until later—shattered about him; his head was struck, but his shoulders took the heaviest blow. He and the car and the glass came to rest; he was under the car, pinned down upon hard, sharp ground, not flat but steeply sloped, unless he was very dizzy. Edges of glass touched him everywhere, altogether too much glass for the windshield; so he came to realize—not connectedly, but now a little and next a little more amid other discoveries—that he was lying on the side of a deep ditch which must have frozen over when full, and later had emptied, leaving a thin surface of ice through which the car had broken.

He spoke to the Royle girl and heard her voice; she