"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.