This was not a contest in sharp-shooting at targets under strict rules, with a medal for a prize. This was a battle in rough country for the rescue of a beautiful girl.
Forbes granted himself a plenary indulgence, and resumed packing, smiling again at Willie's idea that he was a suitor for the post of third husband to Mrs. Neff.
He did not smile so well a few hours later, when Willie, with the kindliest of motives, assigned him to Mrs. Neff's automobile.
"You two sweethearts," Enslee said, with a matchmaker's grin, "will want to ride together, of course. Persis and I will keep out of your way as much as we can."
Forbes was sportsman enough to credit Willie with a bull's-eye. He smothered his chagrin and helped Mrs. Neff into her car, while his two suit-cases were strapped in the trunk-rack with the family baggage.
The motor-caravan was made up of three machines. Winifred ran her own roadster, nursing the steering-wheel to her bosom, while her fat elbows harried Ten Eyck's cramped form. Bob Fielding had been unable to get away from the troubled waters of Wall Street, and Winifred had adopted Ten Eyck as his understudy.
Mrs. Neff took her four-passenger touring-car. Forbes decided after several appalling bumps that it had belonged to her first husband. Alice sat with the chauffeur, dreaming of Stowe Webb, no doubt. In the rear Mrs. Neff, in her most garrulous mood, talked nonsense through a veil whose flying ends kept snapping in Forbes' face. And when they were beyond Broadway her cigarette ashes kept sifting into his eyes.
He was as polite as possible, but his thoughts were trying to pierce the dust-wake of the great six-cylinder touring-car in which Willie Enslee led the way with Persis. All Forbes could see of her was the top of her motor-hood and the veil that fled back like a signal beseeching him to make haste and save her.
Broadway in the late afternoon was thick with the home-going armies, and it seemed to stretch as long and as crowded as the Milky Way. On through Yonkers to Dobbs Ferry and Tarrytown the journey took them, passing an occasional monument of our brief history, a tablet to mark where Rochambeau met Washington and brought France to our rescue, or a memorial to the cowboys that arrested Major André.