preciate De Morbihan's design. He was to be rushed out into the midnight solitudes of the Bois de Boulogne and there run down and slain.
But now he began to nurse a feeble thrill of hope.
Once inside the park enclosure, he reckoned vaguely on some opportunity to make sudden halt, abandon the car and, taking refuge in the friendly obscurity of trees and shrubbery, either make good his escape afoot or stand off the Apaches until police came to his aid. With night to cloak his movements and with a clump of trees to shelter in, he dared believe he would have a chance for his life—whereas in naked streets any such attempt would prove simply suicidal.
Infrequent glances over-shoulder showed no change in the gap between his own and the car of the assassins. But his motor ran sweet and true: humouring it, coaxing it, he contrived a little longer to hold his own.
Approaching the Porte Dauphine he became aware of two sergents de ville standing in the middle of the way and wildly brandishing their arms. He held on toward them relentlessly—it was their lives or his—and they leaped aside barely in time to save themselves.
And as he slipped into the park like a hunted shadow, he fancied that he heard a pistol-shot—whether directed at himself by the Apaches, or fired by the police to emphasize their indignation, he couldn't say. But he was grateful enough it was a taxicab he drove, not a touring-car: lacking the body of his vehicle to shield him, he little doubted that a bullet would long since have found him.
In that dead hour the drives of the Bois were almost
