“Cabby,” said MacIan, again assuming the most deliberate and lingering lowland Scotch intonation, “if ye’re really verra anxious to ken whar a’ come fra’, I’ll tell ye as a verra great secret.  A’ come from Scotland.  And a’m gaein’ to St. Pancras Station.  Open the doors, cabby.”

The cabman stared, but laughed.  The heavy voice behind the wall said:  “Now then, a better back this time, Mr. Price.”  And from the shadow of the wall Turnbull crept out.  He had struggled wildly into his coat (leaving his waistcoat on the pavement), and he was with a fierce pale face climbing up the cab behind the cabman.  MacIan had no glimmering notion of what he was up to, but an instinct of discipline, inherited from a hundred men of war, made him stick to his own part and trust the other man’s.

“Open the doors, cabby,” he repeated, with something of the obstinate solemnity of a drunkard, “open the doors.  Did ye no hear me say St. Pancras Station?”

The top of a policeman’s helmet appeared above the garden wall.  The cabman did not see it, but he was still suspicious and began: 

“Very sorry, sir, but...” and with that the catlike Turnbull tore him out of his seat and hurled him into the street below, where he lay suddenly stunned.

“Give me his hat,” said Turnbull in a silver voice, that the other obeyed like a bugle.  “And get inside with the swords.”

And just as the red and raging face of a policeman appeared above the wall, Turnbull struck the horse with a terrible cut of the whip and the two went whirling away like a boomerang.

They had spun through seven streets and three or four squares before anything further happened.  Then, in the neighbourhood of Maida Vale, the driver opened the trap and talked through it in a manner not wholly common in conversations through that aperture.

“Mr. MacIan,” he said shortly and civilly.

“Mr. Turnbull,” replied his motionless fare.

“Under circumstances such as those in which we were both recently placed there was no time for anything but very abrupt action.  I trust therefore that you have no cause to complain of me if I have deferred until this moment a consultation with you on our present position or future action.  Our present position, Mr. MacIan, I imagine that I am under no special necessity of describing.  We have broken the law and we are fleeing from its officers.  Our future action is a thing about which I myself entertain sufficiently strong views; but I have no right to assume or to anticipate yours, though I may have formed a decided conception of your character and a decided notion of what they will probably be.  Still, by every principle of intellectual justice, I am bound to ask you now and seriously whether you wish to continue our interrupted relations.”

MacIan leant his white and rather weary face back upon the cushions in order to speak up through the open door.