“We’re going to—Blackstone,” here a slight convulsion seemed to seize his throat, he swallowed hard, hiccoughed, and concluded, “to see a football game”—a statement which again set them off into roars of boisterous laughter. Then they all shouted at Eugene:
“Come on! Come on! Get in! We’ve lots of room.”
Eugene got out of the service car, paid the driver, took the small hand-case he had, and got into the other car with Robert and his two companions. They drove off fast, and almost immediately they were dropping down the mountain, along the sinuous curves and turns of the steep road.
Robert’s two companions on this journey were young men whom Eugene had not known in boyhood, with whom he had now only a speaking acquaintance, and both of whom were recent comers to the town. The older of these two was a man named Emmet Blake, and he now sat beside Robert on the front seat of the car.
Emmet Blake was a man of twenty-seven years, a frail and almost wasted-looking figure of medium height, straight black hair, black eyes, and a thin, febrile, and corrupted-looking face which, although almost dead-white in its colour, was given a kind of dark and feverish vitality by a faint thin smile that seemed always to hover about the edges of his mouth, and the dark unnatural glitter of his black eyes.
He lived a reckless and dissipated life and drank heavily: time after time, after a hæmorrhage of the lungs, he had been taken to a sanatorium in an ambulance, and his death had seemed to be a matter of only a few hours. And time after time he had come out again, and immediately started on another wild spree of women and corn whisky with Robert and others of the same breed. He was well-off as to money, and lived expensively, because he was a nephew of George Blake, the great Middle-Western manufacturer of cheap motor cars, which in twenty years’time had created twenty thousand jokes and glutted the highways of the earth in twenty million tinny and glittering repetitions.
The name of the other youth, who was Eugene’s own age and sat beside him on the back seat, was Kitchin. He was a tall, dark, handsome fellow, with agreeable manners and a pleasant voice, the nephew of a retired physician in the town but not native to the place. Eugene had seen him on the streets, but had never talked to him before. It was evident that both Robert and his two friends had been drinking, although not heavily: there was in their manner the subdued yet wild and mounting elation of young men when they begin to drink. They laughed a great
