ied to
New York in quest of adventure, and started back to Princeton about
twelve o'clock in two machines. It had been a gay party and different
stages of sobriety were represented. Amory was in the car behind; they
had taken the wrong road and lost the way, and so were hurrying to catch
up.

It was a clear night and the exhilaration of the road went to Amory's
head. He had the ghost of two stanzas of a poem forming in his mind. ...

So the gray car crept nightward in the dark and there was no life
stirred as it went by.... As the still ocean paths before the
shark in starred and glittering waterways, beauty-high, the
moon-swathed trees divided, pair on pair, while flapping
nightbirds cried across the air....

A moment by an inn of lamps and shades, a yellow inn under a
yellow moon--then silence, where crescendo laughter fades... the
car swung out again to the winds of June, mellowed the shadows
where the distance grew, then crushed the yellow shadows into
blue....

They jolted to a stop, and Amory peered up, startled. A woman was
standing beside the road, talking to Alec at the wheel. Afterward
he remembered the harpy effect that her old kimono gave her, and the
cracked hollowness of her voice as she spoke:

"You Princeton boys?"

"Yes."

"Well, there's one of you killed here, and two others about dead."

"_My God!_"

"Look!" She pointed and they gazed in horror. Under the full light of
a roadside arc-light lay a form, face downward in a widening circle of
blood.

They sprang from the car. Amory thought of the back of that head--that
hair--that hair... and then they turned the form over.

"It's Dick--Dick Humbird!"

"Oh, Christ!"

"Feel his heart!"

Then the insistent voice of the old crone in a sort of croaking triumph:

"He's quite dead, all right. The car turned over. Two of the men that
weren't hurt just carried the others in, but this one's no use."

Amory rushed into the house and the rest followed with a limp mass that
they laid on the sofa in the shoddy little front parlor. Sloane, with
his shoulder punctured, was on another lounge. He was half delirious,
and kept calling something about a chemistry lecture at 8:10.

"I don't know what happened," said Ferrenby in a strained voice. "Dick
was driving and he wouldn't give up the wheel; we told him he'd been
drinking too much--then there was this damn curve--oh, my _God!_..." He
threw himself face downward on the flo