the feeling that he would never forget it, the awed, calm, kind, rural face and the slow, careful, half-literate voice. “He was just as fine as a human being can be.” He felt a kind of angry gratitude that such a man had been there, and had been there first. Jay couldn’t have asked for anyone better, he said to himself. Nobody could.
“He said he was on his way home, about nine o’clock, coming in towards town, and he heard an auto coming up from behind, terrifically fast, and coming nearer and nearer, and he thought. There’s somebody that’s sure got to get some place in a bad hurry” (“He was hurrying home,” Mary said) “or else he’s crazy” (he had said “crazy drunk”).
“He wasn’t crazy,” Mary said. “He was just trying to get home (bless his heart), he was so much later than he’d said.”
Andrew, looked at her with dry, brilliant eyes and nodded.
“He’d told me not to wait supper,” she said, “but he wanted to get home before the children were asleep.”
“What is it?” her mother asked, with nervous politeness.
“Nothing important, Mama,” Andrew said gently. “I’ll explain later.” He drew a deep breath in very sharply, and felt less close to tears.
“All of a sudden, he said, he heard a perfectly terrifying noise, just a second or two, and then dead silence. He knew it must be whoever was in that auto and that they must be in bad trouble, so he turned around and drove back, about a quarter of a mile, he thinks, just the other side of Bell’s Bridge. He told me he almost missed it altogether because there was nothing on the road and even though he’d kind of been expecting that and driving pretty slowly, looking off both sides of the road, he almost missed it because just next the bridge on that side, the side of the road is quite a steep bank.”
“I know,” Mary whispered.
“But just as he came off the far end of the bridge-you come down at a sort of angle, you know…”
