There is No Return Read Free

by pretty girls in very brief bathing suits, but not at a down-at-the-heel summer resort which catered to elderly invalids and teething babies.
    It seemed to me that he changed the subject with suspicious haste.
    “What did they lay this road out with? A corkscrew?” he asked, wincing a little as the ancient bus jounced alarmingly on a hairpin curve.
    “You would think that, with a gasoline tax of seven cents on the gallon, we might at least have decent roads,” I muttered, holding on to the sides of the vehicle for dear life while we wheezed up the incline.
    At this moment, with a warning blast upon its twin sirens, a long sleek machine passed us, throwing a flurry of fine pebbles and stifling dust into our faces.
    “Let somebody run that can run, eh?” murmured Chet Keith.
    The driver shook his head. “We’ll overtake him,” he said with what I considered unjustifiable confidence.
    However, on the second hairpin turn we did indeed overtake the other car. lt was having difficulty negotiating the narrow curve.
    The chauffeur was backing and filling, close enough to the edge of the precipice to make me shiver. I caught a glimpse of a tall thin man in the rear seat. He was fuming over the delay and he gave us a black glance as we went by. I heard Chet Keith whistle softly.
    “Thomas Canby!” he exclaimed.
    I don’t say I should have recognized the power magnate if I had not heard the name, although I had met both Thomas Canby and his wife twenty years before, met them by a coincidence at Lebeau Inn the summer I was there with my father. Naturally that was before Canby developed into the millionaire he was to become.
    He was, in fact, at that time merely a lineman for the local light company, one of the companies which he later organized into his tremendous utility group.
    As I have had occasion to recall, he and his wife had a very difficult time finding the money to keep her and their baby at Lebeau that summer. The child was quite ill and the doctors had prescribed mountain air. I had not thought of it in years, but I distinctly remembered now how terrified little Mrs Canby had been and how she had hung over the baby day and night until it was better. She was a pathetic, colourless little woman, one of the timidest women I ever knew. I had not thought of it before, but I wondered what effect her husband’s tremendous fortune and national reputation had had upon her.
    “It’s queer for Canby to be going to Lebeau,” I remarked without realizing that I was speaking aloud. “I thought they were supposed to have a summer home at Southampton.”
    “They have a duplex on Park Avenue, a lodge at Asheville and a tepee of forty rooms down on Long Island. So what?” demanded Chet Keith.
    I knitted my brows at him. “The daughter must be about twenty-two now,” I murmured, still thinking aloud.
    He gave me an odd glance. “Didn’t you know that Gloria Canby died last fall?” he asked.
    I got the feeling that he was watching me closely.
    “Died!” I exclaimed. “And so young. What a pity!”
    “Perhaps,” he said with an ugly twist to his voice.
    I gave him a scathing glance. “Are you one of those bolshevists who envy a capitalist everything, even his innocent children?” I demanded.
    He shrugged his shoulders. “Thank God I’ve outgrown that rash,” he said, “and God knows nobody envied Thomas Canby his daughter.”
    At this moment the power magnate’s long maroon car passed us again with another indignant flirt of loose gravel. “Apparently Mr Thomas Canby is in a hurry,” I remarked dryly.
    Chet Keith nodded, then smothered a sharp exclamation. The machine ahead had stopped so abruptly, it was all our driver could do not to pitch directly into it. For a moment both cars hung sickeningly on the edge of the bluff, and I felt as if my stomach had turned a somersault.
    “What the hell!” exclaimed Chet Keith. “Sorry,” he muttered with a perfunctory glance at me as he swung out of the bus.
    The