s."

"Sure! But if we should, there's just one thing to do."

"Indeed?" Gray was pleasantly inquisitive, but it was plain that he
suffered no apprehensions. "And that is--?"

"Sit tight and take your medicine."

"I never take medicine."

The chauffeur shrugged his shoulders. "Well, I do, when it's put down
my throat. I _been_ stuck up."

"Really!"

"Twice. Tame as a house cat, me--both times. I s'pose I'll get nicked
again sometime."

"And you won't offer any resistance?"

"Not a one, cull."

"I'm relieved to be assured of that."

For a second time the driver flashed a glance at his companion. It was
a peculiar remark and voiced in a queer tone. "Yes? Why?"

"Because--" Gray slightly shifted his position, there was a movement of
his right hand--the one farthest away from the man at the wheel--and
simultaneously his left arm slipped from the back of the seat and
tightly encircled the latter's waist. He finished in a wholly
unfamiliar voice, "Because, my good man, you are now held up for the
third time, and it would distress me to have to kill you."

The driver uttered a loud grunt, for something sharp and hard had been
thrust deeply into that soft, sensitive region overlying his liver, and
now it was held there. It was unnecessary for Gray to order the car
stopped; its brakes squealed, it ceased its progress as abruptly as if
its front wheels had fetched up against a stone wall.

"Hey! What the--?"

"Don't try to 'heel' me with your elbow," Gray warned, sharply. "Now,
up with 'em--you know. That's nice."

The faces of the men were close together. Gray's was blazing, the
driver's was stiff with amazement and stamped with an incredulous
grimace. Paralyzed for the moment with astonishment, he made no
resistance, not even when he felt that long muscular left arm relax and
the hand at the end of it go searching over his pockets.

Gray was grim, mocking; some vibrant, evil quality to his voice
suggested extreme malignity at full cock, like that unseen weapon the
muzzle of which was buried beneath the driver's short ribs. "Ah! You go
armed, I see. A shoulder holster, as I suspected. I knew you had
nothing on this side." Seizing his victim's upstretched right hand with
his own left, he gave it a sudden fierce wrench that all but snapped
the wrist, and at the same instant he reached across and snatched the
concealed weapon from its resting place. He flung the chauffeur's body
away from him; there was a shar