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"Quick, Jim, quick!" she reiterated, as she supported him through the low gate, and kept her arm in his as they passed down the dark lane, with its homely smells of early cookery and baking bread. Only one passion possessed them the blind and persistent and unreasoning passion for escape, for freedom. "But MacNutt where's MacNutt?" demanded Durkin, coming to a stop.
The brief and brusque finality of tone in the other man warned Durkin that he had made no headway, and he caught up the other's half-mocking and tacit challenge. "For which, I think, this office will be adequately repaid, by being brought into touch with information which will help out its previous action against Penfield!" "Who will give us this?"
"But for the love o' God, who's been doin' things to you?" he went on, in amazement, as he saw the bruised and bleeding and ash-colored face. "They threw me out o' their damned dope shop!" cried Durkin, with an only half-simulated thickness of utterance, as he jerked a shaking thumb toward the lights of the Chinese laundry. "And I guess I'm I'm a bit knocked out!"
He couldn't have been, because I'd met him earlier in the hall downstairs." "I don't know. He said he was. Anyhow, he was in your room " "Sawyer?" demanded Steve incredulously. "Eric Sawyer?" Durkin nodded. "You're crazy," laughed Steve. "Well, he was," answered the other indignantly.
But Durkin, at her side, through the driving spray and rain, pointed out to her the huge rolling bulk and the red funnels of the Cunarder. "Thank heaven!" he said, with a sigh of relief, "we'll be in time to catch her!"
A door, securely locked, opened from the sleeping-room into the outer hallway. The door which opened from the larger room was likewise locked, but to make assurance doubly sure Durkin slid a second inside bolt, for already his quick eye had caught the gleam of its polished brass, just below the door-knob of the ordinary mortised lock.
"This is certainly great!" cried the sheriff, as the airship rose swiftly under the influence of the powerful gas. As the craft went higher and higher his enthusiasm grew. He was not the least afraid, but then Sheriff Durkin was accounted a nervy individual under all circumstances. "Lay her a little off to the left," the officer advised Tom who was at the steering wheel.
Frances Durkin looked at the jeering man before her, studiously, belligerently. "What do you mean by saying he'll punish himself?" she demanded. She seemed like a woman who had just awakened. Her earlier comatose expression had altogether passed away. There was life, now, in every line of her body.
"That play got on your nerves, didn't it?" suddenly asked the lazy, half-careless voice at his side. Durkin and the young Chicagoan were in the musky-smelling Promenade by this time, and up past the stands at the sea-front the breath of the Mediterranean blew in their faces, fresh, salty, virile. "This whole place gets on my nerves!" said Durkin testily.
But she was resisting him, inch by inch, fighting desperately, like a cornered cat, for her very life, yet knowing there could be only one end to that uneven conflict. Durkin, after one comprehending glance, followed his first animal impulse of offense, and descended on MacNutt, beating at the prone, bull-like head, with its claret-colored bald spot, across which ran one livid scratch.