when it’s put that badly,” she cried out. “I can’t explain it to you, not in a hurry like this. But, Jack, can’t you see we belong together? Can’t I go with you?”
“No,” I said desperately, trying to think of something. I couldn’t just brush her off. I didn’t know how, in the first place, for I’d never had enough girls chasing me in my life to get any practice at it. And there was another and more important reason. She knew too much, and if she got furious there was no telling what she would do. “Look, you’ve got everything—”
“Except you,” she interrupted.
“—everything a girl would want. And you’d like to throw it all away and go chasing around over the country with some man on the lam. Do you have any idea at all what it’s like, hiding from the law?”
“Can’t you see it doesn’t matter? I don’t care what it’s like.”
“You think it’d just be exciting. Well, let me tell you. The thrill wears off fast.”
She threw the cigarette out the window. “Wait, Jack,” she said softly. “You think I’m still some idiotic adolescent, just because I don’t like boredom. Well, I meant what I said about excitement, but running from the police wasn’t the only excitement I was referring to. I don’t appear to have much success in trying to put what I feel into words, so maybe I could show you.” She slid over a little in the seat and looked up at me with the gray eyes very large. “Jack. Look here at me. Just bend your head down—a little…”
The next thing I was conscious of was a soft, wild mouth, and the importunate, tightening arms about my neck, and the knowledge that, even with somebody else on my mind, I couldn’t take too much of that. I got hold of myself and straightened up.
She slid back on the seat a little with her shoulders slumped, not looking up. “All right,” she said. “You don’t have to draw me a picture.”
“I’m sorry, Dinah,” I said. “Maybe we’d better go.”
“Yes. But you could have told me, before I made a fool of myself. Is that where she is, in Bayou City?”
“Where who is?”
“Look. You’ve insulted me once. Don’t do it again.”
“There’s not—” I began.
“If you don’t mind, let’s go! I told you I was going to take you to Bayou City, and I’m going to!” She grew quieter then, and went on, “If you’ll slide over, I’ll drive—”
If I’d had any sense I’d have stayed behind the wheel, but I was too relieved at getting started again to heed any warning signs. By the time we were out on the highway, though, I knew what I was in for.
She was doing forty by the time she straightened out, and then I heard rubber scream, in high gear, and knew what she had meant by looking under the hood. The highway ran straight here for six or eight miles, and I sat back in the seat lighting a cigarette and watching the speedometer climb. I thought she would begin to flatten it off at ninety, but she didn’t. At a hundred and five I quit looking.
It was a good road that would have been reasonably safe for eighty, in broad daylight, and there was very little traffic, but it was the cows I had the most trouble with They have a bad habit of finding holes in fences and wandering out onto the roads at night, and I wondered if anybody would be able to separate enough of us from the hamburger to make burial worth while in case we found one tonight.
I thought that after the first blaze of anger burned itself out she might take it a little easier, but I was wrong. She apparently knew the road, for she cut it down before we came up to the turns and then gunned it again for traction as we started into them. Of course, it wasn’t all as fast as that first straightaway, but she managed to stay pretty close to thirty miles per hour above what would be considered an absolute limit for night driving. Seeing, in a little while, that it was going to be like this all the way to Bayou City, I began to worry about patrol cars. We’d run across one sooner or later, and I thought hopelessly about my idea of getting clear out of the country without being seen by anyone who might remember me. Of course,