car, "I
don't know how it is to be done, but we have got to lose those
trailers. I don't care how long it takes or how many miles we cover
doing it, but we must manage to get to Second Place, Brooklyn, without
being followed. Do you think you will be able to make it, or shall I
try to give them the slip by taking the subway?"
Dan reflected.
"There's more than one in the big car and you'd be trailed sure, Miss.
Better take a chance with me, and I'll get you there safely without
them knowing if we ride till morning!"
Then began a strange and devious journey. To Willa, who, aside from
her infrequent visits to the cottage on the Parkway, had seen little of
New York and its environs save in the beaten path of the conventional
social round, it was a revelation. They tore through crooked teeming
side-streets whose squalor was veiled in the falling curtain of snow
and shot across broad avenues with gleaming vistas of light stretching
interminably in either direction, to dash sharply about a corner and
off through a lane of canyon-like factories and sweatshop hives. Once
they skirted huge railroad yards and twice they circled along the
river's edge between towering warehouses, with the tang of salt winds
swirling the flakes about them and a forest of tall masts looming up
ahead.
Dan Morrissey knew the city as only one can who has grown up
practically on its streets and he was following a well-defined route in
his mind as he wove back and forth through the myriad threads which
held together the vast and varied pattern on the loom which was New
York, drawing ever nearer the great bridge. The runabout had been left
behind, but the larger car still trailed and the sharp exhaust of the
motor-cycle reached their ears tauntingly above the subdued rattle of
occasional traffic.
All at once Dan commenced to chuckle and Willa could feel his shoulders
shake beside hers.
"What is it?" she demanded with a quick glance at him.
"I've just thought of something, Miss. If Delehanty is on his station
now, watch us lose the laddy-buck on the motor-cycle!"
They had reached a corner on lower Broadway, whence the home-going
stream of humanity had long since disappeared like ants into the burrow
of subway entrances, but where a burly traffic policeman still loomed
bulkily in the middle of the thoroughfare.
Dan drew the car up at the curb, leaped out and approached the minion
of the law. A short colloquy, and he had returned
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