This was not the sort of situation that suited Sandorski, for we dared not show fight. By one of his favorite rearguard actions we had everything to lose. If Lex were caught and his papers recovered, nothing could save us from the dock–though, I suppose, after months of agony for me and my family, we might have been acquitted. Still better for Hiart and Heyne-Hassingham was our death. That would be the end of any evidence of what had really happened at my shoot, and Hiart–if he arranged things to prove self-defense and could put his fingers in his ears at the critical moment–would be thanked by the police for his gallant chase.
I came to a cow-trampled mud hole where the ruts petered out. Beyond the hole were two roughly stopped gaps. Both led to cultivated fields. This looked uncommonly like the end. I turned off my lights and got out of the car, waiting to recover my night sight. It was the usual dirty, damp November night. We might have been on some exotic plateau of Rockies or Andes instead of a hill in populous England four hundred feet above the sea. There wasn’t a signal from humanity, except the faint smell of wood smoke drifting up from the village on the southwest wind.
The car behind us had stopped to go through the gate. I heard it shut again behind them. I let them drive on towards me, for the ruts leading into blackness would take their attention away from anything that might be happening in the outer dark. Then I turned my car to face the open grass and shot off into the night like a plane taking off. It sounds dangerous, and it was. On the other hand one somehow knows, in a countryside that forms part of one’s blood, what the sweep of the land is likely to be. I merely mean that I knew I should meet an obstruction before I went over the edge of anything, and that the obstruction would be soft. I also felt sure that I wasn’t going to meet anything at all immediately. That may have been due to the feel of the grass or the wind, or, less mysteriously, to rum. One in the car and three more, unwanted, on an empty stomach undoubtedly made my driving optimistic.
We had the devil’s own luck. I missed a pond by inches, and then went slap through a barbed-wire fence into a field of kale. It couldn’t have been better The kale was high enough and formed a dark enough mass for me to begin to brake in time. When we hit it, we merely crashed for a few yards through the soft stalks.
On the damp plowland it took time to reverse and turn. Lex and Sandorski jumped out to push. I doubt if they made much difference, but I wouldn’t like to underrate the sheer nervous will-power of Sandorski in a crisis. What really saved us were the fibrous stumps of the kale, which gave just enough purchase for the back wheels.
When I had pulled out, and back through the gap in the fence, I stopped for the two to get in. Meanwhile Hiart and Pink had followed up the ruts to the mud hole. There they picked up our tracks in their lights, and came nosing along them. They were now something less than three hundred yards away. They couldn’t see us, for the bushes at the edge of the pond I had just missed were partly in the way, and the background and skyline were broken; but undoubtedly they would pick us out as soon as we moved. Sandorski told Lex to lie on the floor, and folded himself into a small tense spring between the dashboard and the front seat.
I started rolling gently over the field towards the lane. The movement, as I feared, attracted attention, and the two great eyes of the following car swiveled round until they were full on my side. They rested there a couple of seconds as Hiart’s driver swung round in a quarter circle to keep me in view. Then he quickly turned the full semicircle, and lit up the rolling field ahead.
“He’s going for the gate!” yelled Sandorski.
Of course he was. I might have bet Hiart would think of that. Once he had his car across the gate or in the lane, there was no way out for us except on foot. We might have tried it, I suppose, and played another successful hide-and-seek in the darkness, but dawn and the police and dogs would soon have settled us.
My course into the kale had taken me more or less diagonally across this great field or down. I now had to run parallel to its lower boundary in order to reach the gate, and at some time I had to swing well out into the field in order to go through. What the boundary was, I don’t know. The thick black shadows looked like a young plantation. At any rate it was something impassable to cars, and I had it looming fifty yards to my left. To my right and about two hundred yards away was Hiart’s car. I call it Hiart’s, but remembering this moment of violence I am sure Pink had taken command, and that he was thinking in terms of a naval engagement.
On went my headlights. They showed good grass ahead, and I pulled up level. For a second or two we were racing on lines not quite parallel that would intersect at the gate. Then our courses rapidly converged. I couldn’t avoid it. I was driving along the obstruction to my left, and it was curving and forcing me closer to Pink.
I had one vast advantage over Pink’s driver. I was running for my life, and he wasn’t. A split second before I got jammed against the edge of the plantation, I braked hard and passed behind them and took the outer berth. My car had terrific acceleration in second, and I pulled up level again at the cost of two leaves of a spring. There weren’t more than twenty yards between us, and Pink took a shot at me. I think it must have been meant for the tires, for he would find it hard to satisfy the police that a shot at obvious fugitives was in self-defense. It went through the rear window and nearly got Lex, who was being tossed under his coat from floor to air and back again. It was a good bit of gunnery from one moving car to another. He was only three feet high and left.
I don’t suppose we ever went much above thirty miles an hour, but over that surface the speed was as alarming as eighty on a bad road. I closed in on them from the outside in order to wreck the driver’s nerves and force him into the plantation I had just escaped. Then I heard Pink’s quarterdeck voice:
“Ram him, Jimmy!”
The driver must have been a naval man too. His quick response was worthy of the service. I turned away and skidded, and he just touched my back bumper. I heard Pink open up with his forward turret. This time he only scored the number plate and a ricochet off the wing which starred my driving window and frightened me into an extra burst of speed.
Pink was so pleased to have something to shoot at that he stayed on my tail a second too long. He allowed me to get so far out into the field that I could go for the gate. If he had raced straight for the objective, he would have had his car across it before I could complete my turn.
I could distinguish the gate now. It was shut. I’ve seen a galloping horse miss his jump and shatter a five barred gate without breaking his legs. I prayed that my car would do the same and roared straight at it. Pink, too late, cut across behind. He was only three or four lengths away, and it seemed certain that this time he must ram me broadside on before I could be through. By how much he missed me I don’t know. There was a crash and a lot of flying wood; then another crash as Pink’s car hurtled into the hedge; and I found myself shooting down the lane, fighting to control the car as it bounced from one bank to the other.
Near the bottom of the lane I slithered and scraped to a stop, and told Sandorski that we were out. He uncurled himself, and straightened painfully into the front seat. Lex remained groaning and muttering in the bottom of the car. I began to feel sorry for the poor man. Ever since we had picked him up, he had had the life of a sack of potatoes going to market.
“What happened?” the general asked.
I told him that the deviationists were in the middle of a hedge and probably upside down, that we had a minute or two at least before they could disentangle themselves, and that I’d explain it all later. The question now was: should we turn left at the bottom of the lane into the unknown, or right and up to the main road through Hinton Fitz-Paine?