The Argosy, April 1916 — page 111: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

A LADY IN tion, the street he was on began to go down- hill. The 155th Street bridge lay before him. He would make Bronx Park—go on, if necessary, to Pelham Bay. And, in a nice, solitary spot, he would leave that big red runabout and its big, fat, sleeping owner for any one else that wanted them. If the man woke up before he was dis- covered, well and good. And Barry had ceased to care whether the waking should take place in this world or whatever next one a man deserved who let a gaudy blond lady drug and rob him. He headed across the bridge, pushing up the spark a little. He had got used to run- ning the car. He had been in the thing so long, he felt as if he had grown up with it. Half way across the bridge a khaki-clad policeman stood beside a motorcycle lean- ing against a little green tower. He was chatting with a blue-clad policeman. He glanced up as Barry came rolling along at just about the law’s limit of speed. He called the blue-clad officer’s attention to the bobbing head. Both of their faces started to broaden into a grin. Then both stopped the grin at once, looked as if they suddenly remembered something, turned their eyes down and read the number. Like automatic signals they each put up an arm and started for the centre of the street. Barry shuddered. The end! The shudder did something to the spark lever or the throttle. He never would know which. Neither did he know then that twelve little cylinders hummed almost si- lently under the big hood of that runabout. But he noticed one thing: The car seemed to jump. It jumped so suddenly he could not take his. hand from the wheel to touch the brake; and his feet were jerked from the pedals, so tht he would have to find them all over before he could begin to use them. He barely man- aged to swerve enough to miss the quicker of the two officers of the law. He was past them. Was he going to stop and wait for them to come up to him? Hadn’t he at last developed the plan to free him from the whole wretched business? Was he going to be taken now? The car was answering for him, gathering speed with every turn of the wheels. But he had no time to listen to the answer. There were wagons and other automobiles and, as he got to the other end of the bridge where it divides in a “Y,”’ there were pedes- trian’. Somehow he had missed them all. 101 The upper arm of the ‘“‘Y-” seemed least cluttered with traffic; so he swung north- ward. As he reached 161st Street he dodged across the front of the cross-town- hurrying vehicles just released by the traf- fic-squad man’s whistle. Up Jerome Avenue! Plenty of room! Best of all, Boscobel Avenue V-ing off from it but a few blocks away, and then but two blocks to his boarding-house. There he could enter and hide in his room; there he was known; there— Yes, there good old Elsie would identify him and assure the wretched pursuers that he could not possibly pick anyone’s pockets, that he was an honest, upright, decent young man. There he would have at least a little corroboration for the time elements in his story, enough to prove that he could not have drugged a man and run all around upper New York with him since leaving the boarding-house. Boscobel Avenue! He whirled into it, not quite sure whether he bounced over the fender of a trolley car or just bumped on the tracks. He caught the shriek of a mo~ torcycle’s horn behind him, saw the frantic traffic man wave a signal to his pursuer. But two blocks! Barry pushed things up another notch. They were, pretty long blocks. But he would make them. Surely he had learned this morning how to drive a car. One block gone—half—three-quar- ters of the second. And then Fate played her last card. The big tank-wagon with its nozzles spraying the street might not look like any of the pictures of Fate; but it was Fate all right. A hundred yards of wet, a trolley car com- ing south on the other side of the street, a grocer’s wagon at the right-hand curb. Barry headed for the ample space there would be between the sprinkling wagon and the grocer’s cart. He hoped the car would hold its straight course over that slippery patch. And the sprinkling wagon turned aside. Barry had got his foot back on the brake. He could jump as the car stopped, and make the last fifty yards in a run. Only the car didn’t stop. For a sicken« ing fraction of a second that seemed eter- nal, its nose pointed straight toward the on- coming trolley; for the next sickening sec- ond it confronted the motorcycle still a block and a half behind; then it seemed destined to climb the curb and the stone steps of a delicatessen store; then it fin- DISTRESS. cComiclboool C©@