Carry, good little sport, leaned more and more heavily upon my supporting arm. Her high-heeled pumps (chosen for motor¬ ing, not for that scrambling, hasty flight over rough, rugged trails) continually tripped her; she turned her slender ankles more than once, with faint ejaculations of impatient dismay. That she was at the point of exhaustion I intuitively sensed, but I dared not let her realize my awareness of her condition; instead, I managed to jerk out occasional words of encouragement that would lead her to believe I thought her capable of far greater effort than yet remained in her fragile body. That we must continue on our arduous, struggling way, Carry realized as well as I. Night in that thick, unfriendly wood was not to be contemplated save as the ulti¬ mate alternative. Yet we two, breathing in thick panting gasps as we willed our ”—and silence reigned where had been utterly frightful sounds!" muscles to repeat, time and time again, the same expansions and contractions that re¬ sulted in our slow forward movement, were facing the fact that night had come on apace under cover of those thunderous and gloomy canopies of darkness which an ap¬ proaching storm was hanging across the lowering sky. Go back we could not if we would, for by now I knew that I could not have found my way back to where we had abandoned the car, when it refused to travel farther. Yet I would have been glad to have felt it possible to return; with plate glass win¬ dows properly fastened up, we would have had the semblance of a refuge about us, whereas now we knew not how long we must stumble forward in the fast-gathering 63
