Part 2

So I did, basket after basket; and, whether it lightened the boat or not, we drew ahead. Ferd rowed like a demon. In the moonlight his face was white and set, with the queerest expression.

We struck the shore with a bump that sent me on my knees, but Ferd grabbed my hand and jerked me out.

"Now run--if you ever ran in your life!" he said. "Make for that grove over there, and bend over. The bushes will hide us."

"I can't," I panted after a minute. "And why should I, Ferd? He's got his old boat by this time----"

"Run!" gasped Ferd. And I ran.

We crouched down in the grove. My teeth were chattering, but I was nothing to Ferd. He was pallid. The puddler landed just then. We heard him throw his oars into the boat and drag it up on the beach, and I knew he was examining the other boat and finding that the wine was gone. We could hear him breathing hard, and he even made a start toward us, beating the bushes with an oar. He was in a red fury, muttering to himself in the most horrible manner. I had been in Ferd's mill once or twice, and I remembered the enormous shoulders the men had, and how they simply toyed with steel rails; and I was paralysed. A puddler turned Berserk!

He gave it up just in time, however, and started back for the boat. I could see him moving about--a huge creature in white flannels. And he seemed to have cut himself on a branch or something, for he was tying a handkerchief round his forehead.

We did not dare to move until he had started back and was safely out from shore. Ferd's voice had lost its strained quality and he looked a little less like death. We could hear the picnic party calling to the man in the boat about the wine, and his calling back that we had got away with it, but for some of them to come over and they could beat the bushes. They couldn't come, of course, until he took the boat back.

"We've got to get out of here, Fan," Ferd said. "In ten minutes the whole shooting match will be here. Can you run any more?"

"Not a foot--I'm all in. And I lost a shoe in the water at the island."

Ferd groaned.

"They'll have us up for stealing their champagne," he said. "I suppose you can walk."

"I can limp along, I dare say." I was wet and cold, and horribly miserable. "Don't let me detain you. They can't arrest me for stealing their wine. You did that."

He turned to me suddenly.

"Fan," he said solemnly, "don't ask me why, but we must get out of here quick. Must! If you can't walk, roll. Now come on!"

There were no houses in sight. The trolley line ends there, and I think it is a picnic grove. He took my hand and dragged me along. I lost my other slipper, but he paid no attention when I told him of it; and just when I was about to sink down and die we reached a road.

"Now," said Ferd, "they came in something--machines probably--for they'll have to get back, and there are no more cars. Ah, there they are!"

There were two machines. I gripped Ferd's arm and held him back desperately.

"The chauffeurs?" I gasped.

"We'll kill 'em, if necessary," he said between clenched teeth.

We were loping down the road toward the machines--Ferd sloshing, rather, with each step; and we could hear loud calling from the islands and the banging of oars in oarlocks.

"F-Ferd," I managed to say, "c-can--you--drive--a--car?"

"Why, you can, can't you?"

"I--can--d-drive--my--own car. I d-don't--know about--any other."

"They're all alike. The principle's the same."

"I don't know anything about the principles," I said despairingly. "And I won't touch a strange machine."

"Oh, very well!" said Ferd sulkily. "We'll make a deuce of a stir--arrested here for stealing a case of champagne; but never mind. It'll blow over."

"We can tell the whole story."

"We cannot!" he said gloomily. "We can't tell on Jane and Annette and Catherine. We'll have to take our medicine, that's all. We needn't give our own names. That's one thing."

I was perfectly crazed with fright and exhaustion. I leaned up against a fence, and I remembered the time Lily Slater asked Ollie Haynes to see her off to Chicago, her husband being out of town; and how Ollie was carried two hundred miles before the train would stop to let him off; and how Harry never believed the story and was off shooting big game at that very minute; and Lily getting gray over her ears as a result, and not even going out to lunch with anybody for fear there were detectives watching her.

And, compared with Day, Harry Slater was an angel of mildness.

The boat was almost across by that time and Ferd was wringing the ends of his trousers. A sort of frenzy seized me. It seemed to me it would be better to be found crushed under a strange car than to be arrested for stealing champagne. I started on, rather tottery.

"I'll try it, Ferd," I said. "I think we'll be killed; but come on!"

For once luck was with us. It was a car exactly like my own! I almost cried for joy. I leaped in and pressed the starter, and the purr of the engine was joyous, absolutely. I let in the clutch and the darling slid along without a jerk. We were saved! I could drive that car. I snapped the gear lever forward into high and the six cylinders leaped to our salvation. We were off, with the white road ahead; and the puddlers were only beaching their boat. Ferd sat half turned and watched for pursuit.

"They'll search the bushes first," he said. "They'll not think of the machines for a few minutes. We can hit it up along the highway for four or five miles; then we'd better turn into a side road and put out the lights and take off the license plates. They'll telephone ahead possibly and give the license number."

We were going pretty fast by that time and just at that moment I saw a buggy ahead in the road. Ferd called to me; but it was too late--I had pressed the siren and the very hills echoed.

"Good heavens, Fan!" he said. "You've done it now!"

We topped a rise just then and Ferd looked back. The puddlers were running along the road toward the place where they had left their cars. It was a race for life after that. Ferd bent over and pressed the button that put out the tail light, and I threw on all the gas I could.

"It's getting pretty serious," Ferd said. "We'll go up for a year or two for this, probably. Stealing a machine is no joke."

"If it comes to that I'll steer the thing over a bank and die with it!" I said, with my jaw set. "Ferd, there's something wrong somewhere! Listen to that knocking!"

The engine was not behaving well. It was not hitting right and it was telling on our speed. As we topped a long rise Ferd saw the lights of another car appear over the crest of the last hill. Down in the valley ahead lay a village, sound asleep. We raced through it like mad. A man in his shirt-sleeves rushed out of a house and yelled something to us about stopping, that we were under arrest. We almost went over him.

The race would be over soon, that was clear. The car was making time, but not better time than the other machine. I do not know how I got the idea, but we went limping and banging along until we had reached the edge of the town, and just beyond, beside the road, was a barn, with the doors open. I turned the car in there, shut off the engine and put out the lamps. Ferd caught the idea at once and leaped out and closed the doors.

"Good girl!" he said. "Unless the farmer heard us and comes out to investigate, this is pretty snug, lady-love. They'll pass us without even hesitating."

They did not, though. It gives me gooseflesh merely to remember the next half-hour. We waited inside the door for the car to pass. We could hear it coming. But just at the barn it stopped and we could hear them arguing. It seems the road forked there and they were not certain which way we had gone. My knees were shaking with terror and Ferd was breathing hard.

When I look back I think I should have noticed how queer Ferd was during the whole thing; and, when you think of it, why did he steal the boat at the beginning and not just borrow it? But I was absolutely unsuspicious; and as for noticing, there was no time.

I lost my courage, I'll admit, when they stopped; and I ran to the back of the barn. There was a horse there and I squeezed in beside the thing; it was company anyhow and not running about the country trying to arrest people who were merely attempting to get home. It seemed uneasy and I tried to pat its head to soothe it--and it had horns! I almost fainted. Somehow or other I climbed out, and Ferd was coming toward me.

"Sh!" he whispered. "They've roused the farmer, and--holy smoke!--they're coming in!"

Somebody had opened one of the doors about six inches. That made a path of moonlight across the board floor.

"I dunno why they closed the barn doors to-night," said the farmer from the opening--"mostly we leave 'em open. Now, gentlemen, if you want water for your automobile there's a pail inside the door here, and the pump's round the corner in the pig yard."

Ferd clutched my arm. The moonlight path was slowly widening as the door swung open. "Quick!" he said; and the next minute I was climbing a ladder to the haymow, with Ferd at my heels.

One thing saved us and one only: the farmer did not come inside to see the car; and whoever did come clearly thought it belonged to the place and never even glanced at it. As for us we lay face down in that awful haymow with openings in the hay big enough to fall through, and watched and listened. I shall never be the same person again after that experience.

Whenever I get cocky, as Day would say, and reflect on my own virtues, and how few things I do that any one could find fault with, not playing bridge for more than two and a half cents a point, and stopping a flirtation before it reaches any sort of gossipy stage, I think of Ferd and myself in that awful haymow, with a man below searching round that miserable machine for a pail, and Ferd oozing a slow drip-drip on the floor below that was enough to give us away--like the blood dropping from the ceiling in that play of David Belasco's.

There was one awful moment before it was all over, when the farmer had gone back to bed and the man returned the pail. The others were all in their machine, yelling to be off.

"They've had time to be gone twenty miles," one of them snarled. "The next time we see them, shoot at their tires. It's the only way."

The man with the pail stood in the doorway and glanced in.

"Pipe the car!" he said. "The farmers are the only folks with real money these days."

He came in with the pail and one of the drops from Ferd's clothes hit him directly on top of the head! I heard it splat! He stopped as if he had been shot and looked up. I closed my eyes and waited for the end; but--nothing happened. He put away the pail and hurried out, and the machine went on.

It was Ferd who spoke first. He raised himself on an elbow and listened. Then he drew a long breath, as if he had not breathed for an hour.

"Well," he said, "I may not be a thief and a robber, as well as an abductor of young married women, but I feel like one." He looked about the haymow, and at me, crumpled in my corner. "Really, you know," he said, "this sort of thing isn't done, Fanny."

"If it only doesn't get into the papers!" I wailed. "And if only Day doesn't hear of it! Ferd, I must look a mess."

He glanced at me. The moonlight was coming through a window.

"You do look rather frowzy," he said.

I think, if there is a psychological moment for such things, that was the moment. My affair, mild as it was, was dead from that instant. Day would never have said such a thing. Day never takes his irritation out on me; the worse I look the more certain Day is to reassure me. For instance, Day never says that--to him--I am as pretty as the day he first met me. He says that I am prettier than I ever was, and that every one thinks so. Day has a positive talent for being married.

Well, we sat in the haymow and quarrelled. We thought it best to let them go on, give up the search and go back to the island for their women companions, before venturing out. So we sat and fought.

"It was stupid," I said, "to have stolen the boat and not borrowed it."

"I'd have had to explain you," said Ferd.

"You need not have mentioned me. What is a lie for, if not for such an emergency? Couldn't you have found that boatman? That would have explained everything."

"I couldn't find the boatman."

"Did you try?"

He turned sulky.

"I did my best," he said. "I risked my life. I'll probably have a sick spell as it is. I've got a chill. How did I know the infernal boat had champagne in it?"

I sat and thought. A lot of things came to me that I had not thought of before, such as Ferd having got up the party and put me in my present position, and having been a stupid in more ways than one. And what if Day had got home unexpectedly? I said this to Ferd.

"Why didn't you think of that sooner?" he demanded brutally.

"What time is it?" I asked, as sweetly as I could.

He held his watch up in the moonlight, but of course it was full of water and not running. His matches and cigarettes were wet, too, and he grew more beastly every minute.

"Ferd," I said finally, "I'm afraid lately you've been thinking that I--that I cared for you. It was my fault. I let you think so. I don't, really. I only care for one man and I think you ought to know it. I've been a shameless flirt. That's all."

Instead of being downcast, he rather brightened up at that remark.

"You'll break my heart if you say that," he said, trying not to be too cheerful.

"There's only one man for me!" I said firmly. "It's not fashionable, but it's very comforting. It's Day."

"I'll never be the same man again, Fanny," he replied. "Am I not to call you up, or send you flowers, or look forward to seeing you at the Country Club on Sunday afternoons? Is life to lose all its joy?"

"Oh, we'll have to meet, of course," I said largely; "but--the other is off for good, Ferd! I find I can't stand too much of you. You're too heady."

Well, he was almost blithe over it, and sat talking about Ida, and what a trump she was about the time he lost so much on copper, and the way she came home from Nice when he had typhoid. It was stupid; but if you can understand me it seemed to put a cachet of respectability on our position. The more we talked about Day and Ida, the more we felt that the tongue of scandal could never touch us. We made a pact of platonic friendship, too, and shook hands on it; and it shows how dead the old affair was when Ferd never even kissed my hand.

About an hour afterward the other car went back toward the island and we got up stiffly and crawled down the ladder. Ferd had had a nap, and he slept with his mouth open!

We slipped out of the barn in the moonlight and reconnoitered. There was no one in sight and the house across the road was dark. Ferd took off the license plates and put them under one of the seat cushions and I looked for the short circuit. I found it at last, and Ferd fixed it with his pen-knife. Then he threw the doors open and we backed into the road. The last thing I remember is that as we started off a window was raised in the farmhouse and somebody yelled after us to stop.

"Damnation!" said Ferd between his teeth. "He'll telephone ahead and they'll cut us off!"

"We needn't stick to the main road. We can go back through the country."

We found a lane leading off half a mile farther along and I turned into it. It was rough, but its very condition argued for safety. As Ferd said, no one in his sane mind would choose such a road. The secret of the lane came out a mile or so farther on, however, when it came to an end in a barnyard. It was a blow, really. We did not dare to go back and we could not possibly go ahead.

"I can go up to the house and ask about the road," Ferd said. "The old stage road ought to be round here somewhere. If we can't find it there's nothing to do but to walk, Fan."

"I can't walk," I said, "and I won't walk. I'm in my stocking feet. I'm through. Let's just go back and get arrested and have it over. I can't stand much more."

"It's only twelve miles or so to town."

"I couldn't walk twelve miles to escape hanging!"

Ferd crawled out of the car and through a pig yard. I heard the pigs squealing. And then for five awful minutes I heard nothing except his distant knock and muffled voices. Then there was a silence, and out of it came Ferd headlong. He fell over the fence and landed in the mud beside the car.

"Quick!" he panted. "Turn round and get back to the main road. They've got him on the telephone, and in another minute----"

Did you ever try to turn an automobile in a panic and a small barnyard, with broken mowing machines and old wagons everywhere? I just could not do it. I got part way round, with Ferd begging me for Heaven's sake to get some speed on, when we heard people coming from the house on a run, and a woman yelling from a window that she could see us and to shoot quick.

There was a field next the barnyard--a pasture, I suppose--and the bars were down that led into it. I just headed the car for it and shut my eyes. Then we were shooting forward in a series of awful bumps, with Ferd holding on with both hands, and the noise behind was dying away.

I do not recall the details of that part of the trip. Ferd says we went through two creeks and a small woods, and entirely through and over a barbed-wire fence, which was probably where we got our punctures. However that may be, in five minutes or so we drew up just inside a fence on the other side of which was a road. And we had two flat tires.

Ferd tried to take the fence down, but he could not; so I did the only thing I could think of, and butted it down with the car. The glass in the lamps was smashed, but we were too far gone by that time to care. I had just one thought; if the gas only held out!

Ferd was quite sure he knew the way to town, but it turned out he did not. For hours and hours we bumped along on two tires and two rims, until my shoulders felt torn from their sockets. The worst of it was the noise we made. Every now and then we passed a farmhouse where the lights were going and everybody had been roused for the automobile thieves; and, instead of slipping past, we bumped by like a circus parade with a calliope.

The moon was gone by that time; and, our lamps being broken, more than once we left the road entirely and rolled merrily along in a field until we brought up against something. And, of course, we met a car. We heard it coming, but there was nothing to do but bump along. It was a limousine, and it hailed us and drew up so we could not pass.

"In trouble?" a man called.

"Nothing serious," Ferd said peevishly.

"Glad to give you a hand. You're cutting your tires to bits."

"No; thanks."

"I can take you back to town if you like."

It was Bill Henderson, Jane's husband, on his way from the club to his mother's in the country! I could not even breathe. Ferd knew it too, that minute.

"We are getting along all right," he snapped, trying to disguise his voice. "If you'll get your car out of the way----"

"Oh, all right, Ferd, old chap!" said Bill, and signalled his man to go on.

We sat as if petrified. Bill was Ida's cousin! The way of the transgressor is hard; though why one should have to lose a reputation built up by years of careful living just for one silly indiscretion is what gets me. I put a hand on Ferd's arm.

"I'm gone!" I wailed. "It will be all over town to-morrow. Bill's the worst old gossip. Oh, Ferd!"

"He didn't see you," Ferd snapped. "For goodness' sake, Fan, shut up! This is my mess. There isn't any limit to the things he can say about me."

We bumped on a little farther. I was crying, I'll admit; my head ached and my spine was jarred numb.

"You'll have to do one thing," he said at last. "You'll have to tell Ida it was you. Heaven knows what she'll think."

"I'll die first!" I snapped.

Well, we got into town finally and it was three-thirty by the first clock we saw. Ferd got out and looked at the car, and then climbed in again.

"Better get along a few blocks and then leave it," he said. "It looks something fierce, and so do we."

And at that instant, before I could even start the engine, we were arrested for stealing the miserable thing!

"There is some mistake," Ferd said loftily, but looking green in the electric light. "This is Mrs. Day Illington and this is her own machine."

"Are you Mr. Illington?"

"Yes!" said Ferd.

The man looked very strange, as well he might, considering--well, considering the facts that came out later.

"I'll have to trouble you to come with me," he said, politely enough. "It will be only a short delay and we'll get this straightened out. But a car answering this description was stolen out the road a few miles and headed toward town, and there's a reward offered."

He stood on the step and I drove to the station house. I had it fixed in my own mind to go home and write a letter to Day confessing all, and then pack a few things and hide my wretched self for the rest of my life. I even planned what to take; my jewelry and my checkbook, and only a dinner dress or two; and I wrote the letter to Day--in my mind--and one to Ida, telling her it was only a lark, but it had gone wrong without any fault of mine. Then we drew up at the station.

Ferd got out and went in, and the officer turned on the pavement to help me out. But it was my chance and I took it; I just threw on the gas full and shot ahead down the street. He yelled after me and then began shooting. One bullet must have struck the good rear tire, for it collapsed and almost turned the car round. But I was desperate. I never looked back. I just drove for all I was worth down the street to its end, and after that down other streets, and still others. All the time I was saying I would rather die, and going round corners on two wheels, or one wheel and a rim.

Finally I got into a part of town I knew and pulled up half a block from my own house. I recall that and leaving the engine still going, and that hideous nightmare of a machine standing by the curb, with its tires lying out on the road in ribbons and its lamps smashed; and I remember going up the steps and finding the hall door unlocked. Then I recall nothing more for a while. I fainted.

It was Martha, one of the housemaids, who found me, I believe, as she was going out to early mass. They got me upstairs to bed and there was no use trying to run away that night; I could hardly stand. They got me some hot tea and a doctor and a trained nurse, and in the morning before breakfast Day came back. He tiptoed into my room and tried to kiss me, looking awfully frightened; but I would not let him.

"Send the nurse out!" I whispered. So he did; and still I would not let him kiss me. "Not until I've told you something," I said feebly. "You may not care to when you've heard it all."

He looked so big and so dependable and so worried that I could have screamed; but I had to tell him. Bill Henderson might have recognised me; and Ferd, as like as not, would be goose enough to tell Ida the whole story. And, anyhow, there's nothing like perfect honesty between husband and wife.

"Day," I said tremulously, "I'm a felon--a thief! I--I stole a lot of champagne last night and an automobile, and broke down fences, and almost ran over a policeman, and was arrested--or Ferd was--Day, don't look like that!" For his face was terrible. He had gone quite white.

"You!" he said.

"Get up and stand by the window, looking out," I implored him. "I can tell you better if I can't see your eyes."

So he did and I told him the whole thing. He never moved, and I kept getting more and more frightened. It sounded worse, somehow, when I told it. When I had finished he did not come to me as I had hoped. He said:

"I'd like a few minutes to get used to it, Fan. I'll go out and walk about a bit. It's--it's just a little hard to grasp, all at once."