He couldn’t be positive, of course, but the cab had seemed to him to have just the one girl sitting in the back of it. The reason he figured it that way was the back of her head occupied the exact center of the small oval glass insert in the rear, and when there are two or more passengers they are usually more evenly distributed on the seat than that.
By the time he neared the cutoff that led into his own place, the cab should have been long out of sight, at the clip it had been going, but to his surprise it was still in view ahead as he crested the last rise. It was dawdling along erratically now, as though experiencing a contradiction of orders on its passenger’s part.
Just as it came opposite the cutoff, with its warning, T. HOLMES’, PRIVATE ROAD, NO THOROUGHFARE, stretched across it, three acoustically perfect screams winged up from it. The next moment, the door flung outward and the figure of a girl either jumped or was flung bodily onto the soft turf edging the road. She rolled over once in a complete somersault, then came to a stop right side up. The taxi put on speed and spurted down the road, red tail glowering vindictively.
Holmes glided to a stop opposite her a moment later and got out. She was in a sideways sitting position now, clutching her instep with both hands. The German shepherd undutifully remained in the car, as though that was his first love, rather than his master.
“Hurt yourself?” Holmes bent over her, took her below the arms and helped her to her feet. She immediately teetered against him.
“I can’t stand up on one of them. What’ll I do?”
“Better come into my place a minute. It’s right down the way there.”
He helped her into the car, drove the short distance down the private road, helped her out again in front of a typical remodeled-for-city-occupancy farmhouse. The dog didn’t have sense enough to follow even then, until Holmes had turned and growled at it: “Come on in, you fool. What do you want to do, stay out all night?” The dog leaped over the side of the car and approached the door independently, with an air of not belonging to anyone.
A colored man opened to the clomp of the Colonial knocker affixed to the door. He greeted Holmes with the familiarity bred of long years of association. “Well, did you get a bang-up finish for that chapter troubling your mind?”
“I did have one,” said Holmes somewhat moodily, “but it was knocked right out of my head again. This young lady’s had a mishap. Help me get her to a chair, then go out and put the car in.”
The two of them helped her down a long pine-paneled living room that ran the entire depth of the house, with a gigantic conical fireplace of cobbled stones set into one side, from floor to ceiling. That is, the trim was ceiling high; the aperture itself was about shoulder height or a little less.
She attempted to stop and sink down when she had reached a large overstuffed chair standing out before it, with its back to the salmon-pink glow. The manservant quickly gave her a little hitch onward, toward another a few paces away. “Not that one — that’s his inspiration chair.”
Seated, Holmes studied her by the firelight, aided by the watery glow of light from the ceiling. The electricity was obviously generated on the premises, judging by its insufficiency.
She was young, and the mere fact that everything about her tried to convey the exact opposite impression showed how young she really was. Eighteen; nineteen at the very outside. Her hair had probably been golden when she was a child, it was darkening to chestnut now, but with golden overtones still lingering in it. Her eyes were blue.
She had acquired, if nothing else, a generous coating of leaves and twigs in her roll by the roadside just now. She brushed at them sketchily, almost as though she hated to efface them until she was sure he had taken note of what bad shape she was in.
“What happened?” he said as soon as Sam had left to see about the car.
“The usual thing. Whenever you see a girl come out of a car without waiting for it to stop, you can draw your own conclusions.”
“But it was a city cab, wasn’t it?” It occurred to him it was a little far out for that sort of thing.
“And the ideas in it were city ideas.” She didn’t seem to want to talk about it any further.
“I guess we’d better have a doctor in to look at that foot of yours.”
She didn’t show any particular eagerness at the suggestion. “Maybe it’ll go down if I just stay off it.”
“It hasn’t gone up any, from what I can see,” he pointed out.
She withdrew it a little behind the first one, so that its outline wasn’t so distinct.
Sam had come back. “Sam, who’s the nearest doctor to us?”
“Doctor Johnson, I reckon. He don’t know us. I can try him if you want.”
“It’s pretty late — maybe he won’t want to come,” she mentioned.
Sam returned to report, “Hell be here in half an hour.”
She said, “Oh,” sort of flatly.
After a while, while they were waiting, she said, “I’ve always wondered what you were like.”
“Oh, then you know who I am?”
“Who doesn’t? I’ve read you from A to Z.” She sighed soulfully. “Imagine sitting here in the same room with you!”
He turned away. “Cut that stuff out.”
“And at least you’re like you should be,” she went on, undeterred. “I mean so many of these people that write red-blooded outdoor stuff are skinny anemic little runts wrapped in blankets. You at least cut a figure that a girl can get her teeth into.”
“You oughta be poured over waffles,” he let her know disgustedly.
Her eyes roamed the raftered ceiling, flickering with flame reflections like sea waves. “You live in this big place all alone?”
“I come out here to work.” If there was a gentle hint in that, it glanced off her.
“What a fireplace; I bet you could stand up on the inside of it.”
“They used to smoke whole hams and turkeys inside it in the old days; the hooks are still set into the inside of the chimney. It’s almost too big, takes it too long to draw and get heat up. I tried to cut it down by relining it, putting in a dummy top and sides of zinc.”
“Oh, yes, I see that chink that seems to border it all around; I thought it was a fault in the stones.”
Sam was thrusting at the fire with a heavy iron poker when the doctor’s knock sounded at the door. He stood it up against the stone facing, went out to admit him. Holmes followed him into the hall to greet the doctor. He thought he heard her give a sobbing little moan of excruciation behind him, but the doctor’s noisy ingress drowned it out.
When they came in a moment later, her face was contorted and all the color seemed to have left it. The iron poker lay horizontal on the floor, as though it had toppled down of its own weight.
“Let’s have a look,” the doctor said. He felt gently with his fingers, and she winced, gave an inarticulate little cry. The doctor clicked his tongue. “You’ve got a bad contusion there, I should say so! But it’s not a sprain, more like one of the little cartilages is smashed, from something heavy dropping on it. Wrap it up in cotton wool. You’ll have to spare that foot for a day or two, give it a chance to mend.”
Even while the overflow wrung from her by pain slowly trickled out of the comer of each eye, the look she gave Holmes seemed to hold something of triumph in it.
Afterward, when the doctor had gone, he said, “I don’t know how we’re going to do it. The station’s a forty-minute pull from here, and I don’t even know if there are any more trains in tonight. I could drive you all the way in to the city myself, but we’d get there about daylight.”
“Can’t I stay?” she said wistfully. “I won’t bother you.”