Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/96



HARLIE BIGWIND deposited Harrington on shore.

"How do I make town, I wonder?" he speculated, then paused to glance curiously about at the signs of recent automobile tracks carving the lush grasses, as if like hieroglyphics they concealed while they wrote down the things he wished to know of last night's fracas and its participants.

But when he had climbed by a short cut to the level of the main road, tunneling through perennial verdure, a coupé was there, with its open window framing a face in a picture hat.

"Why, Mr. Harrington! You have had an accident!" cried a startled voice, beautiful in its concern. "I—I wasn't quite sure where I was to meet you. Besides, that telephone message was so—so laconic that it awed me."

Harrington knew in a blurred way that the door of the coupé opened and that Miss Billie Boland was advancing to him along the highway.

"Are you much hurt?" she called to him across the twenty yards that intervened.

"Not much, thank you," he called back, gazing through a rainbow-mist to where, against a background of ferns, there advanced to him a swaying grace, clad in garments as exotic as the petals of an orchid.

"But what happened?" called Miss Billie again, in