Her nerves had been so badly shaken that she was on the verge of tears again, and she fumbled for her absurdly little handkerchief in the cuff of her sleeve.
Joe’s heart thrilled, and if Jim had not been there and he could have taken his hands from the wheel, he would have comforted her again as he had on the road.
“I’d have followed you to the end of the world,” he said rather huskily.
“How lucky it was that that freight train just happened to be passing at the time,” chuckled Jim. “Can’t you imagine how desperate Fleming must have been when he saw the way barred?”
“It was a friend in need for us, all right,” grinned Joe. “Fleming wasn’t quite tipsy enough to try to butt the train off the tracks.”
“He ought to sue the railroad for damages,” Jim suggested.
“He might get them, too,” laughed Joe. “If a jury saw his face as it is just now, they’d know that he’d been in a mix-up of some kind.”
They found Reggie in a state of great bewilderment and agitation at the hotel. They had told him at the club that Fleming had driven off with Mabel, and though he had not known of the latter’s offensive behavior toward his sister previously, he knew that Fleming had been drinking that afternoon and was in no condition to handle a car.
He was enormously relieved, therefore, when he saw Mabel return safely, though he wondered to see her escorted by Joe and Jim.
They told him all the circumstances and he was furious. He was for starting out at once to hunt up Fleming, but Joe dissuaded him.
“He’s had a good trimming already,” Joe assured him. “We don’t want anything that may bring notoriety to Mabel’s name. I don’t imagine we’ll ever be bothered by him again.”
In the meantime, Fleming, left battered and disheveled on the country road, was wild with pain and rage. His heart was a tumult of seething emotions. He had undergone that afternoon more humiliation than comes to most men in a lifetime. He had been thwarted in his impudent venture. He had been taken by the collar and shaken as a rat by a terrier. He had had to get down on his knees in the dirt of the road and humbly apologize. And then he had been bruised and beaten until he had begged for mercy.
He ground his teeth in unavailing fury. He had been accustomed all his life to have his way. Money had made his path easy. He was not used to the sensation of being the “under dog.”