Felicity's taxi had met a traffic tie-up at Forty-seventh Street which
made further direct advance impossible. In obedience to her plain
request for haste the driver had tried it to the west, found that way
cut off, and so detoured to the east. When, however, he wriggled up to
Broadway on Forty-fourth Street he had met with no better luck.
Here was a din of horns, of racing motors, of harried traffic police.
But not much chance of progress. So Felicity paid him and stepped off
the running-board into the thick of it to have a try on foot at the
very moment when the nearest officer thought to have it cleared.
He raised an arm and roared, bull-voiced:
"Come on there, now!"
And promptly the drivers of the two cars which had been at the heart of
the snarl, like key logs in a jam, both heckled, both in the wrong and
filled with unsaid things, trod harshly upon their accelerators.
Wire-wheeled sedan and lemon-tinted limousine, up-town bound and
cross-town bound, they leaped simultaneously forward, as Felicity
stepped between.
Bystanders screamed so efficiently that their shrill tumult drowned the
wail of overtaxed brakedrums. But that would have helped Felicity
little. Nor could the brakes, for that matter. The lunging start had
been too strong, the space too short to stop in.
Perry Blair, about whom those who screamed had heard something
unpleasant--oh, yes, yellow!--lanced down the narrowing aisle between
radiator and fenders. He struck Felicity like a vicious tackler yet
did not go down, but leaped again. As the cars crunched together they
slithered through the crowd, across the walk, against a wall, into a
heap. And the fall hurt Perry a little, even accustomed as he was to
the taking of blows yieldingly. He was slow to rise. The girl was
quickly up.
"Last down!" she gasped, but her exclamation was somewhat pallid like
her wit. "Hold 'em, Yale!"
Then, while she still faltered, uncertain, shaken, the occupant of the
lemon-tinted limousine came swiftly to her. He was a great hulk of a
man, yet light on his feet with that nimbleness which seems often
astonishing in huge people.
"Let me put you in my car, Miss Brown," he begged, "and set you safely
across. Not badly bruised, I trust?"
She gave him a flash of a glance and gasped again, but this time
inaudibly. His ease with her name did not surprise her. He'd seen her
often enough to know that. But this, she realized, was the first time
that she had really been impressed upon him. Not too steadily,
therefore, that she might need assistance, she let him help her back
across the sidewalk, to the car, and thus away. Pig-iron Dunham? Of
course. Knowing Felicity there is small cause to wonder that she went
without even remembering to thank her rescuer.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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