Читать книгу Pemrose Lorry, Radio Amateur онлайн

49 страница из 55

He shot another glance over his shoulder, the fatherly chauffeur, at the two lassies in his charge. Una had covered her ears with her hands. Pemrose was sitting tragically upright. Her face was pale. In her blue eyes was the glint half-baffled, but not routed, which lit her father’s when, driven to the last ditch of inventive ingenuity, he fought Nature for some discovery.

“Noo, what had I better do?” panted the chauffeur to himself. “Knock the puir thing on the head here now, afore the lassies? To drive on and leave him to die by slow inches in that ill-teethed trap—that’s na possible.... Ods! but he looks hangit-like—shamed—shamed o’ being caught—like—this.”

There was moisture in Andrew’s eye now. Automatically, almost—and looking round for a club—he had slowed down.

And from the ditch at the roadside, the wild mountain byroad, the red fox eyed him, groveling in his last ditch.

“All his tricks an’ snecks no use to him now—an’ that’s what he seems to feel, by fegs!”

The mist in the chauffeur’s pitying eye grew more blinding, putting out for him the flame in the fox’s, as the poor maddened waif-beastie dragged the steel trap shamefacedly to and fro by the three-rail fence, curving snake-fence, that bounded the byroad.