passed and still there was no sign or sound of Israel
Kensky or of Cherry. Then a shot broke the stillness of the night, and
another and another.

"Two rifles and one revolver," said Malinkoff. "Get into the car,
Highness. Are you ready, Peter?"

There was another shot and then a fusillade. Then came slow footsteps
along the cart track, and the sound of a man's windy breathing.

"Take him, somebody," said Cherry.

Malinkoff lifted the inanimate figure from Cherry's shoulder and carried
him into the car. A voice from the darkness shouted a command, there was
a flash of fire and the "zip" of a bullet.

"Let her go, Percy," said Cherry, and blazed away with both guns into
the darkness.

He leapt for the footboard and made it by a miracle, and only once did
they hear him cry as if in pain.

"Are you hit?" asked Malcolm anxiously.

"Naw!" drawled his voice jerkily, for the road hereabouts was full of
holes, and even speech was as impossible as even riding. "Naw," he
said. "I nearly lost my hat."

He spoke only once again that night, except to refuse the offer to ride
inside the car. He preferred the footboard, he said, and explained that
as a youth it had been his ambition to be a fireman.

"I wonder," he said suddenly, breaking the silence of nearly an hour.

"What do you wonder?" asked Malinkoff, who sat nearest to the window,
where Cherry stood.

"I wonder what happened to that boy on the bicycle?"

CHAPTER XVII

ON THE ROAD

Israel Kensky died at five o'clock in the morning. They had made a rough
attempt to dress the wound in his shoulder, but, had they been the most
skilful of surgeons with the best appliances which modern surgery had
invented at their hands, they could not have saved his life. He died
literally in the arms of Irene, and they buried him in a little forest
on the edge of a sluggish stream, and Cherry Bim unconsciously delivered
the funeral oration.

"This poor old guy was a good fellow," he said. "I ain't got nothing on
the Jews as a class, except their habit of prosperity, and that just
gets the goat of people like me, who hate working for a living. He was
straight and white, and that's all you can expect any man to be, or any
woman either, with due respect to you, miss. If any of you gents would
care to utter a few words of prayer, you'll get a patient hearing from
me, because I am naturally a broad-minded man."

It was the girl who knelt by the grave, the tears streaming