And, to complete the horror, over the expanse of his globular face there was a handkerchief, a very dark handkerchief; probably a bandanna. It came up to the eyes. Rosa gaped: the man had only one eye. That was all this impossible creature needed — one eye. A black patch over the left... Rosa felt suddenly like laughing again. Not a very subtle robber! As if his mask were an insurance of anonymity! A brute over six and a half feet tall, weighing in the neighborhood of three hundred pounds, with only one eye... It was ridiculous. He was something out of Gilbert and Sullivan.
“You may as well,” said Rosa breathlessly, “take that foul thing off your face. We could describe you—”
“Rosa,” said Kummer. She stopped. They heard the giant draw his breath in slowly.
“But you ain’t goin’ to,” said the bass voice. They detected a little uncertainty in it. “You ain’t goin’ to, lady.” There was something bovine, ponderous, and stupid in his vibrating undertones; he was like an ox. “The two o’ ye walk on up this here path till ye git to the place where the autos turn in an’ go up to the house; see? I’ll be walkin’ behind ye, an’ my shooter’s ready.”
“If it’s robbery you’ve come for,” said Rosa with contempt in her voice, “take my ring and bracelet and be off with you. I’m sure we won’t—”
“Ain’t trinkets I’m after. Git goin’.”
“Look here,” said Kummer calmly; his hands were at his sides. “There’s no point in dragging the lady into this, whoever you are. If it’s I you want, why—”
“You Rosa Godfrey?” demanded the giant.
“Yes,” said Rosa, feeling a little frightened once more.
“That’s all I want to know,” the man rumbled with a sort of thunderous satisfaction. “Then I ain’t made no mistake. You and this here fr—”
Kummer’s hard fist sank into the fat man’s belly. Rosa’s nostrils flared and she turned to run. Several astonishing things happened at once. The giant, for all his obesity, had iron under his lard. The blow seemed to make no impression upon him; he neither doubled up nor grunted. Instead, he dropped the gun into one of his pockets almost carelessly, flung an enormous arm about Kummer’s neck, jerking him off his feet as if he were a boy, and with the other paw clutched Rosa’s shoulder. Rosa opened her mouth to scream and closed it again. David was gasping, choking...
The giant said mildly: “None o’ your tricks, either o’ ye. You goin’ to be good, Mr. Marco?”
The ground heaved beneath Rosa’s feet and the cliff-walls flanking the path whirled before her eyes. Kummer moved a little, his face white under its tan and his legs jerking like the legs of a hanged man.
She saw it at last. It was a plot, a plot directed against John Marco, whom all women loved and all men hated. And poor David! It was the clothes chiefly, no doubt; Marco was wearing whites tonight, too. And both men were of an age, a height, and a build. If this hulking idiot had been provided with a description of Marco, it would have been easy under the circumstances to blunder and seize David Kummer instead. But how did he know where to find them on the sprawling grounds of Spanish Cape? No one had followed them, she was sure. And who had told him how Marco would be dressed? For he must have been told... A thousand thoughts raced through her brain. She came to her senses with a feeling that hours had passed.
“Let him go!” she cried. “You’ve the — the wrong man! Let him—”
The giant released her shoulder and clapped his paw, redolent of sour dirt, whisky, and cordage, over her mouth. Then he lowered Kummer to the gravel and hooked the fingers of his other hand into Kummer’s collar at the nape. Kummer choked, fighting to regain his breath.
“March,” rumbled the giant, and they marched.
Rosa made inarticulate sounds behind the steel hand; once she tried her teeth on it. But the giant merely cuffed her mouth lightly, and she gave up, tears of pain in her eyes. They marched, their captor between them, gripping Kummer’s collar on one side and cupping Rosa’s mouth on the other. In this way, and in a silence broken only by the assaults of their shoes on the gravel, they made their way awkwardly but rapidly back along the road. They walked between walls of sheer cliff, towering above them on both sides to form a geometric canyon.
At last they reached the point in the path where it branched off to the left in the wide ascending automobile road. In the shadows of the cliffs just before this branch stood an old sedan, without lights, and already turned around to face the main road leading out of Spanish Cape.
The giant said evenly: “Miss Godfrey, I’m goin’ to take my hand off your mouth. Scream, an’ I swear I’ll shove your teeth down your throat. You open the front door of that there auto. Mr. Marco, when I let go that collar o’ yourn, I want ye to jump into the front an’ git behind the wheel. I’ll climb in the back an’ tell ye where to drive to. No noise, either o’ ye. Now do as I tell ye.”
He released them. Kummer fingered his throat gingerly and essayed a pallid grin. Rosa wiped her lips with a dainty cambric handkerchief and flashed an angry glance at her uncle. But Kummer shook his head the slightest bit, as if in warning.
“I tell you,” whispered Rosa desperately, whirling on the giant, “this isn’t John Marco! It’s Mr. Kummer, Mr. David Kummer, my uncle. You’ve caught the wrong man. Oh, don’t you see—”
“Uncle, hey?” said the giant with a low chuckle of admiration. “He ain’t Marco, hey? Jump in, girlie; I’d hate to have to mess ye up. Ye’ve got guts.”
“Oh, you stupid oaf!” she cried, but she pulled the door open and crawled into the car. Kummer stepped in after her with sagging shoulders; he seemed to have felt a presentiment of his dark destiny even then, and perhaps he was husbanding his strength for a final struggle. That was the impression Rosa, her brain a stew of panic, received. She twisted in the front seat and glared balefully at the giant. He had opened the back door and set his foot upon the running-board.
She realized with a start that the moon had risen, for the gravel road was dimly illuminated now and there were patches of silver light on the striated walls of the cliff looming up to the face of Spanish Cape. And then she saw the giant’s foot... It was shod in ripped black leather; it was his right foot; and on the inner side there was a hole and a bulge, where a bunion of gargantuan size grew. A foot of such dimensions that she blinked. It was simply incredible that a human being... Then the foot vanished as the big man thrust himself through the doorway and crashed down upon the cushions. The screams of the springs made the girl want to laugh. She checked herself with a horrified consciousness of her incipient hysteria.
“Git movin’, Mr. Marco,” said the bass voice. “Ye’ll find the key in the switch, an’ I know ye can drive by that yaller roadster o’ yourn.”
Kummer leaned forward, touched the light-switch, turned the ignition-key, and stepped on the starter. A quiet motor hummed, and he released the hand-brake. “Where to?” he asked in a dry, cracked undertone.
“Straight ahead off the Cape. Right smack through the sunk road here, acrost the neck, straight through the park, an’ out onto the main stem. Turn left there an’ keep goin’.” A note of impatience crept into the heavy voice. “Come on, come on. An’ you give one move I don’t like an’ I’ll choke the life out o’ ye. You keep still, girlie.”