Ambrotox and Limping Dick

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Then his arms crossed each other round her body; and it seemed to
Amaryllis that she sank away into space filled with an ecstasy; and
that, after a while, which was not time, she was fetched back into time
and to earth by hands so strong that they had brought the ecstasy with
them also.

There were kisses, not all his.

Then, to focus her joy, she thrust it away from her; and, seeing Dick
Bellamy's countenance, she remembered how he had spoken of what he had
found, when he awoke, in hers.

His eyes shone upon her as she now knew she had always wished them to
shine. Splendid eyes, she had called them in that part of herself where
she had for a long time--quite two days--made pretence of deafness; eyes
very blue and firm, but seldom, until now, to be long held.

"Dick," she said, "that's the first time--just what I wanted."

"What?" he asked.

"Your voice has spoken to me, your ears have heard me, your eyes have
looked at me. But now, your eyes are listening to mine. Oh, Dick!" she
exclaimed.

"Yes," he answered gravely, "it's great to be free."

"Tremendous!" said Amaryllis.

Her hands were looking for her handkerchief in the Brundage pocket. They
encountered a comb, the half-packet of chocolate, a pair of white cotton
gloves which raised a moment's hope, and Dick's pipe, which she had
picked up as they started again on their way; but no handkerchief! And
her cheeks were wet with half-dried tears, and Dick was coming nearer.

"Oh, please," she cried, "do lend me a hanky. You made me a bodice of
one--in that beastly room with the woman--and you took it from a bundle
of them, out of your coat pocket. I felt them there when I wore it. I
left the one you gave me behind, and I've lost my own."

The pathetical-comical expression of a pretty woman in danger of using
elementary means to dry her tears, made Dick Bellamy chuckle with
laughter of a quality that Amaryllis had not heard from him before,
while he chose the least rumpled handkerchief from his stock of four,
and shook it open for her.

She took it, blessing him as women will bless a man for such relief;
and, as she used it, there struck him, like a smack in his face, the
memory of her hand and another handkerchief.

"I saw you use your own," he said, "on the box of that Noah's Ark of a
wagonette. I remember your pretty fingers and action. I hoped nobody
behind us would see that it was a lady blowing her nose. It was a little
handkerchief--your own," he insisted. "When did you lose it?"

Amaryllis perceived that the question bore upon their safety, and
puckered her forehead, thinking.

"I wiped my fingers with it, after I'd taken Tod Sloan's bridle off,"
she answered, "There was a sticky mess of hay and chaff on them from the
bit, and I remember wiping it off with my handkerchief."

"Seen it since?" he asked.

"No," said the girl. "Does it matter? Even if I did drop it then,
Melchard wouldn't go in there. He hadn't any horses."

"The ostler called after us, you remember. He was waving something
white."

"Oh! You didn't tell me. And you'd given him half a crown!" said
Amaryllis.

"Seemed a grateful sort of bloke, didn't he?" said Dick, ruefully.

"And wanted to give it back to me? Oh, Dick! Melchard was there, close
by, talking to the handsome clergyman."

"Was it marked."

"An embroidery-stitched A.C. That's all," said Amaryllis.

"C doesn't stand for Bunce. Let's get out of this," said Dick Bellamy.

CHAPTER XX.

A ROPE OR SOMETHING.

As they reached the level of the moor and the Drovers' Track, to join
which ancient road their path stretched on for yet a mile, they turned,
moved by a common impulse, to look down on the green hollow which had
been the nest of so great a happiness.

"Emerald, you said, Amaryllis?"

"And blue, Dick, from the sky."

When they had tramped a half-mile or more in silence which seemed to
Amaryllis very close communion, Dick spoke; for already he was feeling
the stones of the world beneath their feet.

"We put our money on the wrong horse, dear. They didn't suspect--they
knew. And they're near us," he said.

"I don't care. If they kill me now, Dick, I don't care."

He agreed--nodding more sympathetically, she thought, than any man
before him had ever nodded.

But after another silence, he said:

"And yet that makes it all the more necessary to come out top dog this
time. Where d'you think they are?"

"If the Drovers' Track's good enough for a car," she answered, "I should
guess--after all, it's all guessing, isn't it?--I should guess that they
turned off the road at the hawthorns and the white stone, and drove
straight on to Harthborough."

"They've had time to go and come back," said Dick. "If we had food with
us, we might hide all night on the moor. But you'd be ill by the
morning."

"Let's go on," said Amaryllis.

"You lead me to luck," he answered, "so what you say goes. A train's the
safest place for us, and, if Melchard's seen his picket there after
driving right over this ground, he won't be expecting to find us on the
way back."

"He may be between us and Harthborough now," said Amaryllis.

"If we can pass him, then," said Dick, "his Harthborough picket won't
give us much trouble. Our other way is the London road. There we might
run into Melchard plus his picket. The railway's at Harthborough, so
Harthborough's got it."

"And here," said the girl, "is the Drovers' Track."

Before they knew it, they had stepped into a way wider and more clearly
marked than the path which had brought them across the base of the
triangle of which the apex was the white stone by the hawthorns they had
never seen.

"It's a derelict Roman road," said Dick, as they walked along it towards
the cleft in the ridge. "See the small paving stones--here--there--and
you can feel 'em through the turf, here at the side. Most of this grass
has come since the railways took the cattle and the goods wagons off the
road. If the track is as good as this all the way----"

"What's that?" exclaimed Amaryllis, stopping and listening.

They were not more than three hundred yards from the point where the
road began to rise from the broad, level space of the moor spreading on
both sides of the old paved causeway in firm, close-nibbled grass,
interspersed with tufts of ling and heather, varied by rarer clumps of
gorse.

Not within a hundred yards in any direction could Dick find possible
cover from eyes descending the Bull's Neck.

The pair stood motionless, their hearts in their ears.

What they heard was unmistakable.

"A motor," said Amaryllis. "It's coming down."

She laid a hand on his shoulder, lifting her face to him.

When he raised his own from it, it was to watch the point where the
descending road took its last bend in the passage by which it had
traversed the ridge: the point where the approaching car must appear.

With flushed face and unflinching eyes, Amaryllis stood beside her
lover, her right hand still lying light on his shoulder, her sun-bonnet
fallen back, and the beauty of hair and features open to the coming
enemy.

As the blue car pushed its nose round the corner, and, turning, made
straight for the lower plateau, she glanced at Dick's face once more; to
see there an impersonal serenity which she might have found inhuman, had
she been a mere spectator of the drama which was coming. Being, however,
one of its persons, she felt herself enwrapped, and uplifted from fear
by the consciousness that a calm mind and a swift brain were supporting
each other in her service.

In her soul she cried already, not _Nous les aurons_, but _Il les a_.

"They'll see us," said Dick. "When I say 'run!' make for that
gorse-bush. I'll be behind, overdoing my limp. When I say 'down!'
fall--sprained ankle. I try to pull you up. You grip your ankle and
yell. They'll be out of the car and after us. When they're close, I
shall bolt across the road. Yell out 'don't leave me.' They won't touch
you--they're after me--I've got the stuff. When they're well away, get
back to the car. Get in. Can you drive her?"

"Yes, it's a Seely-Thompson."

"Get her round, head to the rise, ready to pick me up. Got it?"

"Yes," said Amaryllis.

From the car came a queer animal cry. The machine shot suddenly forward.

Deceived by the immobility of the waiting pair, the driver had increased
his pace.

"Run!" said Dick, and Amaryllis leapt the ditch at the roadside and ran
in the direction he had given. He followed clumsily, exaggerating his
lameness.

The car shot by them, as they ran obliquely in the opposite direction,
so adding, before the driver could pull up, a hundred yards to their
start.

It was, therefore, not until Amaryllis was at the rise of the ridge that
they heard behind them the two pairs of feet in pursuit.

"Down!" said Dick, close behind her; and with a well simulated shriek of
pain, the girl fell in a heap.

"Oh, my foot!" she cried.

Dick's chief fear was that shooting should begin too soon.

But he heard Melchard's high voice shouting angrily to Mut-mut in his
own tongue.

"Jagun pakai snapong. Brenkali akau mow pukul sama prempuan."

And Dick smiled, turning his head in time to see Mut-mut tuck away his
revolver.

He leaned over Amaryllis, with pretence of trying to pull her to her
feet.

"All right. It works. He's telling Crop-ear not to shoot, 'fear of
hitting you."

Amaryllis pushed his hands away, clutched her ankle and moaned aloud.

Dick turned from her and, at a better pace than before, hobbled across
the road, pursued by entreaties from Amaryllis so agonized and lifelike
as almost to deceive the very author of the scheme.

As he began, with increased appearance of lameness to labour up the
slope, he once more heard Melchard's voice:

"Jagun pakai snapong, kalau dea ta mow lepas. Kita mow dapat."

Labouring still more, Dick glanced behind him and saw the two pursuers
straining every nerve to overtake him, and for the moment giving no
thought to Amaryllis.

Something more Melchard said, but this time Dick could not catch the
order. Mut-mut, however, interpreted, by altering his course and running
along the foot of the ridge towards a place where the ascent appeared
less steep. By this, it seemed, he intended to cut across Dick's line of
flight, and to drive him back upon Melchard.

Melchard, meantime, was toiling up the slope in Dick's footsteps with a
determination unexpected in a man of his appearance and mode of life.

On the other side of the ancient causeway, at the very foot of the
slope, Amaryllis, full of courage and calculation, but with a heart
beating painfully until her moment for action should come.

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 Dick 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.

Dick, 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 Dick, and Dick, 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 rushing 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 Dick 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; Dick, 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.

Dick looked round him. Melchard was on his feet, bent and searching the
long grass and scrub of the lower slope.

"The beast's got some guts," muttered Dick.

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

"He's found his gun," said Dick.

A raised arm and a sharp crack proved his words.

"Throw in the top speed," said Dick. "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 assurance
which satisfied Dick 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 Dick 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, Dick saw the bestial 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 Dick'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 Dick fired.

The bullet was too late to stop that gorilla-like spring, and Mut-mut,
with a glitter of steel flashing 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 Dick'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 Dick 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 cushion 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
cushion under her head and two beneath her feet, he let her lie awhile.
Then, encouraged by the faint colour creeping back to her cheeks, he sat
beside her in the road and lifted her shoulders in his left arm, coaxing
her to life and forcing between her pale lips burning drops of "Robbie
Burns."

So that, when her eyes came open, and a little sense into her ears, this
was the kind of thing that she heard:

"Oh, yes, but you must! It's three stars, and there's only a pair of
twins in your eyes. Proof strength, and yours isn't, you darling! Drink,
will you, you wicked girl? I tell you, it's all-malt, and not a jim-jam
to the cask. That's the way, my beauty! Now another! It's
Pre-War--fitting prize for Our Brave Women Who Showed The Tommies How To
Fight!"

"How silly you are, Dick, dear!" she said at last, wiping her lips. "And
what perfectly beastly brandy!"

Dick tasted the stuff, and frankly spat it out.

"I suppose it might be worse, seeing its called whisky, and allowing for
the label," he said. "Young woman, I'm going to kiss you somethin' crool
in a minute. 'Course I'm silly! What was it you did, when I was only
taking a snooze?"

"Cried," she answered.

"And I laugh to see you all right again."

But Amaryllis was looking about her.

"Is it gone, that awful thing?" she asked, whispering.

"Gone for good," said Dick.

"And, oh! the car? How did you ever stop it?"

"You stopped it, you wonder-child. And there's a great deal more 'how'
about that."

"Then--then it's the same thing as last time?" she said, her face paling
once more.

"The same thing," admitted Dick. "It was him or us, you know. And
there's not much egoism in saying we're better worth keeping, is there?"

Though she shuddered again and bore a grave face, he could see that she
was relieved.

Rising with the help of his hand, she tried to smooth her rumpled
feathers, and said:

"Hadn't we better go on?"

"I've got to move something from the car first," he replied, with
ambiguity merely euphemistic. "You stand here and keep a look-out
towards Harthborough."

"All right," she answered, understanding very well what he had to do.
She turned away, and then, with an effort, her face still averted,
"Can't I help you, Dick?" she asked.

"Yes--by sitting on that stone and not turning round till I let you."

And he went back to the car, taking the "Robbie Burns" with him.

In his shaken and exhausted condition, the task of dragging that
revolting corpse from the car was not easy. Heavy he had known the body
would be, but when he had opened the door on the off-side, and would
have pulled the dead thing out by the heels, he was surprised to find
that he could not move it. On a second effort the slight yielding of the
mass was accompanied by a sound of rending and he remembered Mut-mut's
right hand, armed with a weapon of unspeakable cruelty, which only once
before in his life had he seen--the Mahratta baag-nouk, or Tiger's Claw.

He went round to the car's-near side, and there found, as he had
expected, the dead right hand anchored to the lining-cushions by what
was, he supposed, a unique specimen, made to the fancy of the creature
that wore it; for, in addition to the leather strap across the back of
the hand, two rings were welded to the instrument, through which to pass
the second and third fingers, thus keeping in position the four short,
razor-edged steel claws hidden in the palm.

Dick loosened the buckle of the strap, and drew the hand, already cold,
from the rings; picked the baag-nouk from the cushion, wrapped it in a
greasy cloth out of the tool-box, and hid it under the seat.

The thought of that gruesome weapon, more frightful than the unsheathed
claws of the royalest Bengal tiger, hanging over the head of his chosen
among women, stung Dick Bellamy to very unceremonious removal of the
body, which, after rifling it of a handful of cartridges, he flung by
the roadside; and then, lest Amaryllis should see the awful head again,
even in death, he covered the whole corpse with an overcoat of
Melchard's from the car.

The engine had run down. As he cranked it up, Dick was seized by a
sudden savage desire to have in his hands the man who had brought all
his outrage, suffering and terror to the girl whose uncovered head and
patient back he could see waiting for him down the road.

A fierce rage, such as he had seldom felt, and never since boyhood,
flooded his body with a dry heat, and stimulated his intelligence.

For with these thoughts of the evil Melchard came sudden insight into
the man's purpose at the foot of the Bull's Neck, and his probable
action at the present moment.

"He was shooting to drive us into Mut-mut's arms, and to make us believe
our danger was all behind us," he reasoned. "And it's a white elephant
to a dead rat he's trudging up this road now to find what Mut-mut's left
of us. Perhaps he's heard the two shots, and me cranking up."

Not daring to call Amaryllis, he trusted her precise obedience to his
orders, and sank, almost as swiftly as Pepe into the landscape.

Crouching, crawling, worming himself on his belly from tree-stump to
boulder he mounted some ten feet above the road on the side away from
the car, and then, invisible from the road level, continued his course
until he had retraced about fifty yards of the way they had travelled.

Then he stopped, lying prone where two rocks, standing so little apart
that they seemed long years ago to have formed a single mass, gave him
view of the road's whole width.

He laid one ear against the rock, and over the other a hand.

After a minute's waiting, footsteps; three more, and a weary figure came
in sight where the level road began.

The joy he felt kept him patient until Melchard, unmistakable, was right
beneath him.

"Hi! Melchard!" he cried.

Melchard started, stopped, and looked anxiously round.

"Never heard the voice before? You'll hear it often, and lots of it,
soon, Melchard. Pull out your gun."

The man in the road made no attempt to obey. From Mut-mut's revolver
Dick sent a bullet which threw up the dust at Melchard's feet.

"Two inches to the right of your feet."

He fired again. Again the little puff of dust.

"An inch and a half to the left of your feet," he sang out cheerfully.
"The next'll be half-way between and three feet higher. Put down your
gun."

Melchard produced his automatic and dropped it.

"Kick it away from you."

Melchard obeyed, and his weapon lay three yards out of reach.

"Move an inch, and I'll put a hole in your slimy heart."

Melchard stood, still game enough to control in some measure the
trembling which had seized him.

Then Dick raised his voice.

"Miss Caldegard!" he shouted.

"I'm coming," came the clear voice in reply, and a patter of light feet.

Dick could just see the car, and Amaryllis when she reached it.

"Where are you?" she called, bewildered.

"Keep straight on. You see a thing something like a man, standing in the
road, don't you?"

"Yes," answered Amaryllis.

"Near it you will find an automatic pistol, on the ground. Pick it up,
please, and go back to your seat," shouted Dick.

Amaryllis obeyed him. But, after going a little way, she called back to
him and instinctively she imitated his formality in presence of the
unclean.

"Mr. Bellamy!" she cried. "Please--not this one."

To this allusion Melchard had no clue. But there was in her tone
something which turned the blood cold in him.

The invisible Dick, however, answered in a laughing voice so joyous that
Amaryllis was vaguely distressed.

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