Page:Vance--The trey o hearts.djvu/286

250 the motor-cycle occupied most of the width of the road; there was little room between them and the declivity, less between them and the forest. To try to pass them on the latter side would be only to dash his brains out against the trees; while to make the attempt on the outside would be to risk leaving the road altogether and dashing off into space. …

It was impossible to stop the cycle. In desperation Alan chose the outside of the road; and for the space of a single heartbeat thought that he might possibly make it, but with the next realized that he would not—seeing the front wheel swing off over the lip of the slope.

At this he acted sharply and upon sheer instinct. As the cycle left the road altogether he risked a broken knee by releasing his grasp of the handle-bars and straightening out his leg and driving it down forcibly against the road bed. The effect of this was to lift him bodily from the saddle; the machine shot from beneath him like some strange projectile hurled from the bore of a great gun, and Rose crashed against him in the same fraction of a second.

Headlong they plunged as one down the hillside, struck its shelving surface a good twenty feet from the brink of the road, and, flying apart, tumbled their separate ways down the remainder of the drop and into the friendly shelter of the underbrush.

Something nearly miraculous saved them whole.