"It does matter most infernally. Don't you know that you make no more than a featherweight of difference to the car?"
"I feel as if I weighed a thousand pounds, now."
"It's that snow!"
"No. It's you. Your crossness. I can't have people cross to me, on lonely mountains, just when I 'm trying to help them."
His glare of rage turned to a stare of surprise. "Cross? Do you think I was cross to you?"
"Yes. And you just stopped in time, or you would have been worse."
"Oh, I see," he said. "You thought that the 'epithet' was going to be invidious, did you?"
"Naturally."
"Well, it was n't. I—no, I won't say it! That would be the last folly. But—I was n't going to be cross. I can't have you think that, whatever happens. Now sit still and be good, while I push again."
I weighed no more than half the thousand pounds now, and the cannon ball had dissolved like a chocolate cream; but the car stood like a rock, fixed, immutable.
"There ought to be half a dozen of me," said the chauffeur. "Look here, little pal, there 's nothing else for it; I must trudge off to St. Flour and collect the missing five. Are you afraid to be left here alone?"
Of course I said no; but when he had disappeared, walking very fast, I thought of a large variety of horrors that might happen; almost everything, in fact, from an earthquake to a mad bull. As the sun leaned far down toward the west, the level red light lay like pools of blood
