The Lost Valley | Page 6

took my attention
off the ground for an instant I stubbed my toe against one or the other
of them. Bryce panted and puffed and wheezed and seemed more like
an hippopotamus than ever. Whatever might be the gain as far as
decency was concerned, his clothes, from a spectacular point of view,
made him look worse than ever. His collar was tight, and that made his
face the color of a scraped carrot, and his coat and trousers clung to him
in the most unexpected places--just where they shouldn't.
To make a long story short, we came at last to the edge of the spinifex,
and thence dropped steadily down into the hollow that contained the
reserve. I picked out Bryce's car right off. It was painted a battleship
grey, and if cars can have a personality, this had such another as its
owner. It wasn't slim--there was nothing of the racer about it. It was
squatly built and had just the same heavy and humorous look as Bryce
himself. It stood out from the other cars like a hunch-back amongst a
line of athletes.
"That's my car," said Bryce proudly. "She's not much to look at, but
she's just the sweetest runner you've seen."
I nodded. I was quite open to conviction.
CHAPTER II.
AN OLD FRIEND.
Hitherto events had moved so swiftly that I hadn't had time to look

calmly at the situation, but once we settled down in the car and Barwon
Heads dropped into the dust behind us, I began to think rather seriously.
It was perfectly obvious, even to a more clouded intelligence than mine,
that there was something mysterious, if not shady, about my
prospective employer. Despite his assurance that the law was on his
side, I had grave doubts. If everything was perfectly square and above
board why the deuce didn't he report the affair to the police and give
them the task of looking after him, instead of hiring me at an exorbitant
wage? He seemed anxious to fight shy of publicity in any shape or
form and, though he had been very cordial, even familiar with me, his
very apparent frankness and joviality had awakened my suspicions.
There was something fishy going on, and that something, whatever it
was, centred round the piece of wood that I had so casually kicked out
of the sand. It struck me all of a heap that nothing had really begun to
happen until I had unearthed it. As soon as Bryce had seen where I was
sitting, he had started to run inshore, the other man had stationed
himself behind the rocks, the curtain had been rung up and the play had
begun. Now the question was what part did the piece of wood play in
the game? Bryce, I felt sure, could clear the mystery up with a word,
but I was certain that it would be long before he would say that word.
The car was all and more than he had said. It had speed, it was
comfortable, and its mechanism was far less complicated than any I had
yet seen. We ate up distance in fine style. Bryce seemed to have no
nerves at all, for more than once he tore round corners on two wheels
while I clung to the side of the car and swore at him. He grinned
cheerfully over his shoulder at me and asked me if I were nervous.
I laughed back at him with as much sang-froid as I could muster. I had
no objection to risking my life once in a while when there was good
pay at the end of it, but I couldn't see the sense of tempting Providence
just for the sheer fun of the thing. Of course, if we did spill, it would be
all right with Bryce--he was so fat that he'd just bounce--but I was
slimmer, and I knew from experience that I had very brittle bones.
Once in the Solomons, when a wild boar charged me, I lay for weeks in
a trader's hut waiting for an obdurate fracture to knit up again. Some
idea of the furious pace at which Bryce pushed the car along can be

guessed from the fact that we did the fourteen miles in something over
twenty minutes. It had been quite half-past eleven when we left the
Heads, and the clock in the car wanted a few minutes to twelve when
we sailed over the bridge and up Moorabool-street. We cleared a
stationary tram by inches, twisted in an S curve to avoid a farmer's
waggon and then, with a heart-rending grind, Bryce threw over his
clutch and slowed down to a snail-like crawl of ten miles an hour.
"This asphalt paving makes a great motor track," Bryce said to me,