He did not look at them.
The car had overshot him, slowing; now he passed it at his swift, silent, steady pace; again the car speeded up and passed him, the men leaning out and looking ahead.
He was going fast too, silent, with the delicate swiftness of an apparition, the implacable undeviation of Juggernaut or Fate.
Behind him the siren began again its rising wail.
When next the men in the car looked back for him, he had vanished completely.
He had turned full speed into another lane.
His face was rocklike, calm, still bright with that expression of fulfillment, of grave and reckless joy.
This lane was more rutted than the other, and deeper.
It came out at last upon a barren knoll where, springing to earth while the bicycle shot on, falling, he could see the full span of the ravine along the edge of town, his view of it broken by two or three negro cabins which lined the edge of it.
He was quite motionless, still, alone, fateful, like a landmark almost.
Again from the town behind him the scream of the siren began to fall.
Then he saw Christmas.
He saw the man, small with distance, appear up out of the ditch, his hands close together.
As Grimm watched he saw the fugitive’s hands glint once like the flash of a heliograph as the sun struck the handcuffs, and it seemed to him that even from here he could hear the panting and desperate breath of the man who even now was not free.
Then the tiny figure ran again and vanished beyond the nearest negro cabin.
Grimm ran too now.
He ran swiftly, yet there was no haste about him, no effort.
There was nothing vengeful about him either, no fury, no outrage.
Christmas saw that, himself.
Because for an instant they looked at one another almost face to face.
That was when Grimm, running, was in the act of passing beyond the corner of the cabin.
At that instant Christmas leaped from the rear window of it, with an effect as of magic, his manacled hands high and now glinting as if they were on fire.
For an instant they glared at one another, the one stopped in the act of crouching from the leap, the other in midstride of running, before Grimm’s momentum carried him past the corner.
In that instant he saw that Christmas now carried a heavy nickelplated pistol.
Grimm whirled and turned and sprang back past the corner, drawing the automatic.
He was thinking swiftly, calmly, with that quiet joy:
‘He can do two things.
He can try for the ditch again, or he can dodge around the house until one of us gets a shot.
And the ditch is on his side of the house: He reacted immediately.
He ran at full speed around the corner which he had just turned.
He did it as though under the protection of a magic or a providence, or as if he knew that Christmas would not be waiting there with the pistol.
He ran on past the next corner without pausing.
He was beside the ditch now.
He stopped, motionless in midstride.
Above the blunt, cold rake of the automatic his face had that serene, unearthly luminousness of angels in church windows.
He was moving again almost before he had stopped, with that lean, swift, blind obedience to whatever Player moved him on the Board.
He ran to the ditch.
But in the beginning of his plunge downward into the brush that choked the steep descent he turned, clawing.
He saw now that the cabin sat some two feet above the earth.
He had not noticed it before, in his haste.
He knew now that he had lost a point.
That Christmas had been watching his legs all the time beneath the house.
He said, “Good man.”
His plunge carried him some distance before he could stop himself and climb back out.
He seemed indefatigable, not flesh and blood, as if the Player who moved him for pawn likewise found him breath.
Without a pause, in the same surge that carried him up out of the ditch again, he was running again.
He ran around the cabin in time to see Christmas fling himself over a fence three hundred yards away.
He did not fire, because Christmas was now running through a small garden and straight toward a house.
Running, he saw Christmas leap up the back steps and enter the house.
“Hah,” Grimm said. “The preacher’s house.