was driving at terrific speed. They had begun to rip and tear along between the cotton-fields and over the dusty sand-clay roads, mistaking the screams of women and the shouts of men, as they swerved by their cars and wagons in a cloud of yellow dust and at a murderous clip, for admiring applause and enthusiastic cheers, an illusion which only spurred them on to greater efforts.
The upshot of it was that they finally tore into town, careening hideously along a central street and with no slackening of their speed whatever. The excited people in that part of the State had been phoning in about them for the last fifteen miles of their mad journey, and now they were halted suddenly at sight of the police, who stood lined up across the street in a double row—big, red-faced, country cops—to stop them.
The first brilliant, sparkling and wildly soaring effects of their intoxication had now worn off and, although they still felt full of power and a savage rending strength, the corn whisky was now smouldering in their veins more dully and with a sombre and brutal drunkenness. Eugene seemed to see all shapes and figures clearly—the coarse red faces of the country cops and their clumsy lumbering bodies, and the street drowsy and dusty in the warmish autumn afternoon.
The grasses on the lawns of houses were faded, sere and withered-looking, the leaves upon the trees had thinned and hung yellowed, dry and dead, and in the gutters a few dead leaves stirred dryly, a few scampered dryly in the streets before a moment’s gust of wind, and then lay still again.
Robert slowed down and stopped before that solid wall of beefy country blue and red: the police surrounded them and clambered heavily over the sides of the car, two standing on the running-boards, two on either side of Eugene on the back seat, and one with Robert and Emmet Blake up front.
“All right, boys,” said one of them, good-naturedly and casually enough, in the full, sonorous and somewhat howling voice of the countryman, “drive on down thar to the station-house now.”
“Yes, sir! Yes, sir!” Robert replied at once in a meek and obedient tone, and with a comical drunken alacrity. “How do you get there, Captain?” he said with a cunning and flattering ingratiation.
“Right down this here street to your right,” said the policeman in his drawling and countrified tone, “until you come to that’air second turning where you see that’air f’ar hydrant. Turn in to the left thar,” he said.
“Yes, sir!” said
