Diane of the Green Van

Whiskey did not help. Last night it had treacherously magnified the voice of conscience into a gibing roar.

Money! Money! The ray of the lamps ahead, the fork of the lightning, the flickering gaslight there at the crossroads, they were all the color of gold and like gold--of a flame that burned. Yes, he must have money. No matter what the voice, he must have money.

At the crossroads he halted suddenly. To the south now lay his cousin's camp, to the north the storm.

Perversely Carl wheeled about and drove to the north. A conscience was a luxury for a rich man. Let the thing he had done, sired by the demon of the bottle and mothered by the hell-pit of his flaming passions, breed its own results.

It was a fitful nerve-straining task, waiting, and he had waited now for weeks. Waiting had bred the Voice in his conscience, waiting had bored insidious holes in his armor of flippant philosophy through which had crept remorse and bitter self-contempt; once it had brought a flaming resolve brutally to lay it all before his cousin and taunt her with a crouching ghost buried for years in a candlestick.

Then there were nights like to-night when the ghastly hell-pit was covered, and when to tell her squarely what the future held, without taunt or apology, stirred him on to ardent resolution.

But alas! the last was but an intermittent witch-fire leading him through the marsh after the elusive ghosts of finer things, to flicker forlornly out at the end and abandon him in a pit of blackness and mockery.

Very well, then; he would tell Diane of the yellowed paper; he would tell her to-night. However he played the game there was gold at the end.

He laughed suddenly and shrugged and swept erratically into a lighter mood of impudence and daring. There was rain beating furiously in his face and his hair was wet. Well, the car pounding along beneath him had known many such nights of storm and wild adventure. It had pleased him frequently to mock and gibe at death, with the wheel in his hand and a song on his lips, and now wind and storm were tempting him to ride with the devil.

So, dashing wildly through the whirl of dirt and wind, heavy with the odor of burnt oil, he bent to the wheel, every nerve alert and leaping. As the great car jumped to its limit of speed, he fell to singing an elaborate sketch of opera in an insolent, dare-devil voice of splendid timbre, the exhaust, unmuffled, pounding forth an obligato.

The lightning flared. It glittered wickedly upon the unlighted lamps of a car rolling rapidly toward him. With a squirt of mud and a scatter of flying pebbles, Carl swung far to the side of the road and slammed on his brakes, skidding dangerously. The other car, heading wildly to the left, went crashing headlong into a ditch from which a man crawled, cursing viciously in a foreign tongue.