Ambrotox and Limping Dick Part 33

This, she had resolved, must be the moment when she should lose sight of the last runner; and by turning her head sideways, though never raising it, she could see that d.i.c.k had the same idea; for he had so directed his flight that he and Melchard were soon hidden from her, while the lumbering Mut-mut, wasting huge force, it seemed, upon each short stride, pounding along the lower ground, vanished only when, reaching his chosen line of ascent, he began to mount the hill.

Then Amaryllis rose, lifted the voluminous skirt, tucked the hem into the waistband, and ran, with long flashes of grey stocking, for the abandoned car.

d.i.c.k, still leading his enemies on, saw her in one of his calculating looks behind him. And his heart leapt into his throat for pride of the woman that could listen to, comprehend and interpret orders--and carry them out with a stride like that.

He prolonged his backward look, and Melchard, below him, observed that it was directed over his head, and turned his eyes in the same direction.

He saw the girl running, pulled a weapon from his hip and tried a long shot.

The crack of the Browning had hardly reached her ears before Amaryllis was in the driving-seat. But not for a flicker did she turn her eyes from the business of the moment.

Melchard, with his left hand on his hip and the barrel of the automatic resting on the upturned elbow close to his chin, was on the point of firing again at the very moment when Mut-mut, having reached the top of the ridge, was running back to meet d.i.c.k, and d.i.c.k, coming down the slope at the best of his prodigious though uneven stride, was within two paces of Melchard's back.

At the sound of his rus.h.i.+ng approach, and in the very act of firing, Melchard started. The shot went wide, and the man turned himself and his weapon on the enemy that was nearer even than he guessed.

In the very moment of wheeling about, he received a rugger hand-off on his right jaw, which launched him many yards, sideways down the slope, to land and turn literally heels over head as he fell.

His pistol fell more slowly and further, after describing a wavering arc over his head.

And then d.i.c.k Bellamy ran; ran as he had not run since he broke the tape in a certain sprint of four hundred metres at Buenos Ayres, in forty nine and a quarter seconds. But that was when his legs were an equal pair.

Amaryllis saw it all; Mut-mut on the sky-line of the ridge, hesitating; Melchard and his pistol in eccentric parabolas; d.i.c.k, with a wisp of black hair over his wounded cheek, "flying," she called it, down the last of the slope, and crossing the level ground to her and the car; a wild man running, she thought, with the pace of a racehorse, and the movement, not of a runaway, but of a winner. "And, oh!" she would say to him afterwards, "your funny eyes! How they blazed!"

Within four strides of the car.

"Let her rip," he grunted, and taking the low door of the tonneau in his stride, landed on the back seat.

The car rushed forward.

d.i.c.k looked round him. Melchard was on his feet, bent and searching the long gra.s.s and scrub of the lower slope.

"The beast's got some guts," muttered d.i.c.k.

Melchard stood erect and began to run towards them, slowly and painfully.

"He's found his gun," said d.i.c.k.

A raised arm and a sharp crack proved his words.

"Throw in the top speed," said d.i.c.k. "We _must_ go through the Bull's Neck. No cover the other way."

He looked up at the ridge. Mut-mut was not there nor anywhere in sight.

CHAPTER XXI.

THE BAAG-NOUK.

The car rushed at the slope, and the shoulder of the cutting hid it from Melchard the fraction of a second before his next shot was heard.

Amaryllis took the double bend of the little canon with an a.s.surance which satisfied d.i.c.k of her ability.

The sprint had exhausted his reserve of nervous force, for the moment slender; and he lay back in the ample seat of the tonneau scarcely more than half-conscious.

The road straightening before her and still climbing, Amaryllis glanced at him over her shoulder.

"There's some brandy left," she shouted, her eyes again on her work, "in your left pocket. Finish it."

Her voice roused him; with an effort he found and unscrewed the flask.

He had hardly drained it before sight came back to his eyes and he remembered the danger ahead.

Mut-mut!

They had reached a strip of road level and straight, some two hundred yards in length, which crossed the breadth of the ridge, on its way to a descent as steep as the climb already accomplished. But even this, the highest part of their road, ran in a cutting, or natural cleft, in the spine of the ridge; and rocks and bushes, with a few stunted trees, rose in jumbled terraces on both sides of the car.

Cover was there for a hundred Mut-muts; and for d.i.c.k Bellamy one was more than enough, while he could not see him.

With his heart in his mouth and Ockley's gun in his hand, he sat waiting.

But Amaryllis, in the false belief that both enemies were behind her, and well taught in the handling of a car, was not going to begin an unknown descent at full speed. About half-way across the level, she slackened the pace, turning her face a little to the left, as if to speak to the man behind her.

And in that moment, with the words in his mouth to bid her quicken, not relax the speed, d.i.c.k saw the b.e.s.t.i.a.l one-eared Malay, erect upon a boulder, not more than three feet on the off-side distant from the car.

The brute was on the point of leaping down upon them.

The girl saw d.i.c.k's revolver go up, turned, and saw its target.

The horrors of the morning, coming to a climax in this shock like a nightmare's crisis, seemed to stop her heart. With instinctive memory of her instructor's, "If you're taken bad, miss, throw out your clutch, jam on your breaks and faint comfortable," she stopped the car and lost consciousness.

In the same moment d.i.c.k fired.

The bullet was too late to stop that gorilla-like spring, and Mut-mut, with a glitter of steel flas.h.i.+ng in one of his outspread palms, launched himself upon them, landing, like some huge and horrible cat of dreams, on all fours in the body of the car.

His left ribs were pressed against d.i.c.k's knees, his right hand tearing at and ripping the cloth and leather of the car's side-linings as he struggled to rise.

What was fastened in that right hand d.i.c.k had seen, and with Ockley's last bullet he blew out Mut-mut's brains.

Before even freeing himself from the weight of the corpse, he felt for its hip-pocket, and pushed what he found into his own belt.

Then, cursing himself for having finished the brandy, he searched the locker under the cus.h.i.+on of the seat and found, amongst a confusion of odds and ends, a sealed bottle of whisky and a corkscrew.

"Robbie Burns, Three Star, All-malt, Pre-War, Liqueur Highland Whisky,"

said the label, gay with pseudo-tartan colours, which, in happier hours, would have scared him worse than the words.

When he had stretched Amaryllis, still unconscious, in the road, with a cus.h.i.+on under her head and two beneath her feet, he let her lie awhile.