"Yes, I can see two lights. It might be someone else, mightn't it?"
"Not likely, on this road. But we're not taking any chances," and with that the car bumped down across a gully and lurched up to a grassy approach to a big stone barn that loomed above them, then slid down another bank and passed close to a great haystack, whose clutching straw fingers reached out to brush their faces, and so swept softly around to the rear of the barn and stopped. Cameron shut off the engine instantly and they sat in utter silence listening to the oncoming car.
"It's they, all right!" whispered Cameron softly. "That's Passmore's voice. He converses almost wholly in choice profanity."
His mother's hand stole out to touch his shoulder and he reached around and held it close.
"Don't tremble, mother, we're all safe!" he whispered in a tone so tender that Ruth felt a shiver of pleasure pass over her for the mother who had such a son. Also there was the instant thought that a man could not be wholly "rotten" when he could speak to his mother in that tone.
There was a breathless space when the car paused on the road not far away and their pursuers stood up and looked around, shouting to one another. There was no mistaking their identity now. Ruth shivered visibly. One of them got out of the car and came toward the barn. They could hear him stepping over the stony roadside. Cameron laid a quiet hand of reassuring protection on her arm that steadied her and made her feel wonderfully safe once more, and strange to say she found herself lifting up another queer little kind of a prayer. It had never been her habit to pray much except in form. Her heart had seldom needed anything that money could not supply.
The man had stumbled across the gully and up toward the barn. They could hear him swearing at the unevenness of the ground, and Ruth held her breath and prayed again. A moment more and he was fumbling about for the barn door and calling for a flash light. Then, like the distant sound of a mighty angel of deliverance came the rumble of a car in the distance. The men heard it and took it for their quarry on ahead. They climbed into their car again and were gone like a flash.
John Cameron did not wait for them to get far away. He set the car in motion as soon as they were out of sight, and its expensive mechanism obeyed his direction almost silently as he guided it around the barn, behind the haystack and back again into the road over which they had just come.