He swung the fence outward and drove through it and stopped the car again and replaced the fence. He jumped into the car again and started off in second—and heard, somewhere near him but out of his sight, a whinny of surprise and fear from a horse’s throat and the thudding of galloping hoofs.
He reached the top of the rise—and stopped the car. He did not know whether it was at that moment or a few seconds earlier that he first noticed the glow in the sky; the pink, upward-spreading glow which was deepening to led against the silver-tinted blackness of the natural night.
He stared through the spotted windshield at the glow, and he seemed to cease living with everything except his mind. If they had fired Los Robles, it meant only one thing: they already had Clare. . . .
He sat without moving. His hands gripped the wheel and were numb with the force of the grip. His mind was alive to agony—but it would not make thoughts.
He did not know whether to go on or turn back. And his mind would not think. It only felt.
He switched off the engine. Something in his head was saying:
And then it happened. He was staring towards the black belt of trees and the glow above them when there was a movement near him in the long grass and he jumped back and whipped a hand to his hip-pocket for the Lüger.
A figure rose from the grass and came steadily, too steadily, towards him—a slight, small, trousered figure which was not a boy but Clare.
He could not believe his eyes. He stared through the faint moonlight, his hand still tight around the pistol-butt. He knew—but he dared not know.
She came right up to him. There was an unnatural precision about her walk. Her face showed ash-grey in the silver light. He did not move. She came close to him, very close. She did not speak. She did not make any sound.
He touched her. He put an arm about her shoulders and tried to read her face and saw it only as a mask. He said:
“You are hurt?” and then could not get any more words to come from his mouth.
“No,” she said, and that was all.
“Your father?” He had to force his lips to move.
She said: “He’s dead. They killed him.” Her voice was flat, without any tone-gradation. It was not like her voice. She said:
“There were a lot of men. They came to the house. We were having dinner. I’d cooked it because the servants are out to-night. They wanted to take me away. Father killed one of them. Then they shot him—through the head.” Her voice was still flat and level, without trace of emotion. “I got away—while the commotion was on when they shot father. I dropped out of a closet window and they didn’t see me. I slipped into the stable and took Pedro out. I got on him bareback and went off fast before they could stop me. I went the other way first and then doubled around when I was sure they couldn’t hear me. Your car frightened Pedro and he dumped me and ran off.”
The glow in the sky was high and spreading and growing every moment more shot with orange. Otto did not say anything. He took her by the arm and led her to the car and put her into it. She went stiffly, like an automaton. He climbed in beside her and turned the car and then stopped it and got out to open the fence and very soon was on the Hudson road again and driving, as fast or faster than the twisting narrow road allowed, away from the glare behind them.
They drove the eight miles to the far highway in nine minutes—and nothing followed them. In the back of his mind, Otto was concerned about this: he did not know whether it was matter for relief or added reason for apprehension.
Clare sat stiffly beside him, silent and immobile. She spoke only once, when they were on the last three-mile straight-away which runs downhill to the main road. She said:
“It was such a lovely house.” But her voice was still the same, stiff, stranger’s voice.
Otto did not speak at all. His mind was working—very fast. A new plan must be made—and, moreover, its making would keep his mind from sick dwelling upon the thought of the harm he had brought to her.
He slowed for the highway turning and swung out on to it. His breathing stopped as he saw a car pulled up at the corner with three men standing by it. But as he passed, cutting over to the other side of the wide main road, he saw that there was another man, in light-coloured overalls, who was changing a wheel.
There was very little southward traffic. He took the outer lane and kept his right foot down and hurtled at over eighty miles an hour back towards San Francisco.