it was too dark for him to see where we were.”
A small car, traveling rapidly, hummed by. And in some way it gave him a feeling of relief. He glanced back. In the moment of light he saw the six remaining passengers in the tonneau, sitting like so many shadows, nodding slightly with the motion of the bus. When the other car had passed, the night and the road seemed darker and uglier than before.
Hardly a minute later he started again at the harsh noise of the buzzer.
“Driver, I want to get out here.”
The same voice, and the same blackness of scrub pines. As the man got out, the driver put his head into the darkness and looked about. There might or might not have been some trail through the woods. He could not see.
He used the throttle a little more.
“It may be some game that they are up to,” he told himself. “But if they want to rob me, why do they get out before they have their money’s worth out of their fares?”
Now the bus was fairly swallowing up the road.
“Half an hour more of this and we’re—”
B-r-r-r! The buzzer again.
“Driver, I want to get out here!”
Butler did not put out his head to look this time. It seemed safer not to. Besides, he knew that there was no crossroad of any kind. Out of the corner of his eye he glanced at the man beside him in the emergency seat.
“Is he in this, too?” the driver wondered. “Why can’t he say something?”
But the fellow was still looking out into the darkness, without ever having moved his head.
“What a cursed, black road,” he muttered inside his chest. When the buzzer growled again he started violently because he had been listening tensely.
“Driver, I want to get out here,” he mimicked to himself. And his skin prickled all over when the words were repeated, in exactly the same tone, from the darkened tonneau.
The fifth man got out. Butler drove on and did not look around. Without being fully conscious of it, he was driving faster than he had ever driven before. The lightened car rocked as it plunged on over the road.
“Why is it that the fewer there are, the more scared I am?” he wondered. He listened intently for the buzzer, nearly starting out of his seat at the first harsh vibration.
“Driver, I want to get out here.”
And the sixth man disappeared into the blackness of the pines, where there was neither house nor trail. The two remaining men in the back of the car were silent as shadows. In the emergency seat the other man had never moved nor turned his head.
“I wish we could meet some more cars,” the driver thought. He put on the brakes as the buzzer snarled again.
“Driver, I want to get out here.”
The repeated sound of the buzzer and the voice was maddening. Again he stopped between the ugly walls of darkness, letting the seventh passenger out.
“Seven from nine makes two,” he told himself as the bus lunged on. “If they start anything, I might be able to handle the two of them. If only the one beside me would turn around, or get out, or say something!”
And the long ear shot rocking through the darkness, with only the driver and the one shadow in the great tonneau, and the man who was looking intently into the blackness of pines and the night. Butler gript the wheel and felt his hair prickling on his head. The one in the back was moving about. Perhaps he was reaching for the—
