screamed curses at him. Down through the night they tore at murderous speed, the boy laughing at curse and prayer alike as they shot past the blind menace of street-crossings.
“You Goddamned scoundrel!” Gant yelled. “Stop, you mountain grill, or I’ll put you in jail.”
“Whah-whah.”—His laughter soared to a crazy falsetto.
Daisy, arrived for a few weeks of summer coolness, quite blue with terror, would clutch the most recent of her annual arrivals to her breast, melodramatically, and moan:
“I beg of you, for the sake of my family, for the sake of my innocent motherless babes—”
“Whah-whah-whah!”
“He’s a fiend out of hell,” cried Gant, beginning to weep. “Cruel and criminal monster that he is, he will batter our brains out against a tree, before he’s done.” They whizzed with a perilous swerve by a car that, with a startled screech of its brakes, balked at the corner like a frightened horse.
“You damned thug!” Gant roared, plunging forward and fastening his great hands around Luke’s throat. “Will you stop?”
Luke added another notch of blazing speed. Gant fell backward with a howl of terror.
On Sunday they made long tours into the country. Often they drove to Reynoldsville, twenty-two miles away. It was an ugly little resort, noisy with arriving and departing cars, with a warm stench of oil and gasoline heavy above its broad main street. But people were coming and going from several States: Southward they came up from South Carolina and Georgia, cotton-farmers, small tradesmen and their families in battered cars coated with red sandclay dust. They had a heavy afternoon dinner of fried chicken, corn, string— beans, and sliced tomatoes, at one of the big wooden boarding-house hotels, spent another hour in a drugstore over a chocolate nut— sundae, watched the summer crowd of fortunate tourists and ripe cool-skinned virgins flow by upon the wide sidewalk in thick pullulation, and returned again, after a brief tour of the town, on the winding immediate drop to the hot South. New lands.
